A bad-taste joke by Alan Jones in October created a national storm. These comments in the “science” show were supposedly considered, deliberate and researched.

This morning on the “science” show Robyn Williams equates skeptics to pedophiles, people pushing asbestos, and drug pushers. Williams starts the show by framing republicans (and skeptics) as liars: “New Scientist complained about the “gross distortions” and “barefaced lying” politicians come out with…” He’s goes on to make the most blatant, baseless, and outrageous insults by equating skeptics to people who promote pedophilia, asbestos and drugs.

“What if I told you pedophilia is good for children, or that asbestos is an excellent inhalant for those with asthmatics, or that smoking crack is a normal part and a healthy one of teenage life, to be encouraged? You’d rightly find it outrageous, but there have been similar statements coming out of inexpert mouths, distorting the science.”

“These distortions of science are far from trivial, our neglect of what may be clear and urgent problems could be catastrophic and now a professor of psychology at UWA has shown what he says is the basis of this unrelenting debauchery of the facts…”

Stephan Lewandowsky goes on to defame

This is degradation and a malicious attack on skeptics with misinformation:

“They were rejecting the science not based on the science... but on other factors…
what we basically found was the driving motivating factor behind their attitudes was their ideology.
People who endorse an extreme version of free market fundamentalism …

They are also rejecting the link between smoking and lung cancer, and between HIV and AIDS…

Ladies and gentlemen it’s time to get serious. Both Williams and Lewandowsky are ignoring the scientific evidence, denigrating their opponents, destroying rational conversation and honest discussion before it can even start. We can’t let them get away with this.

They are paid public servants who use taxpayer funds to push their personal ideology. It has to stop.

Robyn Williams, what you do is not science. It’s crass tribal warfare.

Name-calling in order to suppress debate

The class of people who use regulations to control others, rather than persuasion and voluntary competition, have resorted to name calling for years to suppress the free and fair debates that they cannot win. Now they are employing that technique in other areas.

What they road-tested on skeptics, they now use in the wider political debate against their political opponents — such as Tony Abbott and Alan Jones. With each success they are becoming more loud, aggressive, and obnoxious.

The mainstream media makes this cheap tactic successful. As long as they promote these anti-science, baseless smears as if they were serious commentary the media is the problem.

When are the MSM going to stop treating the names as serious content, because they are so transparently untrue and designed simply to smear opponents? Indeed, when are the MSM going to stop being complicit or even active partners in the name calling? Perhaps we could start with demonstrations at ABC offices…

It is hard to believe, just at a moment of heightened sensitivity about offensive speech, and only a week or so after the commonwealth government announces a royal commission into the sexual abuse of children. Even harder to believe is that he specifically links former ABC Chair Maurice Newman into his comments and refers to his ideas on climate change as “drivel”.

Indeed it is worse than that. The government, via the Australian Research Council is involved in suppressing dissent.

…

Heads must roll over this, including Williams’. But the problem is obviously more widespread and involves the University of Western Australia, where Lewandowsky holds his chair, the ARC, the ABC, and possibly even the government.

‘My Dear Bernie, as you have a scientific training you should know there can be no CO2-AGW. The ~100 m IR emission/absorption depth of the atmosphere is within 1 K of the Earth’s surface so its thermal IR, near enough black body, switches off IR in those same bands at the surface apart from a few water vapour sidebands.

No IR absorption, no ‘GHG blanket’, no CO2-AGW. This is basic radiation physics. Unfortunately, meteorologists like Trenberth are taught incorrect physics and imagine ‘pyrgeometers’, IR pyrometers, measure a real energy flux, not a temperature signal. So, the models exaggerate warming by ~6.8x.

Please tell the loonies at DECC there can be no CO2 climate change, the Earth is cooling as the sun’s magnetic field heads below 1500 Gauss and cloud cover increases and we should be planning for ice blocking the Northern ports from ~2020. This has been the biggest scientific and commercial fraud in history and DECC is at the heart of it.’

Yes, I wonder how many have rushed off indignant emails to the ABC without having listened to the broadcast or read the transcript? If you are serious about taking Williams to task a cool head and cold facts are required.

When making comments that take the second hand account, no matter how accurate that account is, and then making comments about the original that assume things that were never mentioned in the second hand account.

What if I told you that paedophilia is good for children, or that asbestos is an excellent inhalant for those with asthma? Or that smoking crack is a normal part and a healthy one of teenage life, to be encouraged? You’d rightly find it outrageous. But there have been similar statements coming out of inexpert mouths again and again in recent times, distorting the science.

Now let’s compare to what Jo posted:

What if I told you pedophilia is good for children, or that asbestos is an excellent inhalant for those with asthmatics, or that smoking crack is a normal part and a healthy one of teenage life, to be encouraged? You’d rightly find it outrageous, but there have been similar statements coming out of inexpert mouths, distorting the science.

MY my.. it seems that what Jo posted (before the transcript was available) was EXACTLY what the ABC reports on its official transcript!

One wonders if Gee (and Catamon and dlb) will now accept that what Jo posted is “cold facts” (dlb’s words)?

Sorry RoHa,
The official Australian Government list of civil honours gives “Robyn” as the spelling, year 1988.
Evidence trumps belief. I think I have the winning hand because that list would be vetted carefully.

Well as it is the traditional female spelling, and as he does appear to be a bit of a big girls blouse, maybe it’s apt?

Interesting though, that these warmists, who have a pretty solid track record now of projecting their own inadequacies and weaknesses onto others to scapegoat them with, should be resorting to such terms?

Perhaps the last word on this, after my initially flippant response is this:

By equating Climate Skeptics with Paedophiles, Robyn Williams has committed the most egregious crime, IMO. He has, whether deliberately or not, legitimised “Paedophilia”, or as I prefer to term it more accurately- “child rape”. He has done so by suggesting by inference that the raping of children is equated merely with a form of civil disobedience, a lifestyle choice which reflects one’s ideology, and by doing so Williams has directly insulted and harmed victims of child sexual abuse by diminishing their suffering to the level of a political or sociological disagreement. To infer that, in his position as a presenter on a taxpayer funded programme, is inconsistent I’m sure with the charter of the ABC, and has given comfort to every child rapist who listened to his programme that they are not criminals per se, merely that they dissenters from social normalcy. As such he should tender his resignation forthwith, no excuses, no correspondence entered into.

You see it is not we skeptics whom he has most insulted, but the innocent victims of this insidious and widespread crime, which he has sought to equate those who disagree with him on points of Science.

I used my work email address which has my company name as the domain and since that company is the one that actually broadcasts the ABC TV and Radio signals nationwide, it will be interesting to see if I get any “blow-back” at work or not. I do not think so, but it may add a modicum of weight to the complaint itself.

Thanks for your email to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. This automatic response is to acknowledge that your mail has been received and has been allocated the reference number C46932-12. Where requested, a detailed response will follow. The ABC endeavours to respond to such complaints within four weeks of receipt. However, please be aware that due to the large volume of correspondence we receive, and the complex nature of some enquiries, responses may at times take longer than this.

Your email will be addressed by ABC Audience & Consumer Affairs. If your complaint is about a matter of personal taste or preference, Audience & Consumer Affairs will ask the manager responsible for the program to provide you with a response. If your complaint raises a serious editorial issue – such as factual inaccuracy, lack of balance, or inappropriate content – your complaint will be investigated by Audience & Consumer Affairs. Audience & Consumer Affairs is a separate unit within the ABC, independent of program areas, and assesses complaints against the requirements set out in the ABC’s Charter, Code of Practice and Editorial Policies.

Well I got a reply on the 9th January, so their response was close to being within the four weeks given that the Christmas period was included.

Thank you for your email regarding The Science Show edition of 24 November.

Your complaint has been reviewed by Audience and Consumer Affairs, a unit separate to and independent from ABC program areas. In light of your concerns, we have assessed the content in question against the ABC’s editorial requirements in regard to harm and offence as outlined in section 7.1 of the ABC’s Code of Practice, available here: http://about.abc.net.au/reports-publications/code-of-practice-2011/

On review, Audience and Consumer Affairs are satisfied that when taken in context the introductory comments by presenter Robyn Williams did not equate climate change sceptics to paedophiles. This segment was framed in terms of the broad subject of distortions of science by using the example of the US election and politics more generally. The presenter quoted from a recent New Scientist magazine article on the US election and then stated:

What if I told you that paedophilia is good for children, or that asbestos is an excellent inhalant for those with asthma? Or that smoking crack is a normal part and a healthy one of teenage life, to be encouraged? You’d rightly find it outrageous. But there have been similar statements coming out of inexpert mouths again and again in recent times, distorting the science. This is what The Economist magazine said last week about the election in America …

These rhetorical questions, as Robyn Williams said, were “outrageous” and used to grab the listeners’ attention and highlight the broad point that absurd statements have been made in the face of scientific evidence. The examples were not intended to be taken literally and were not particularly in relation to climate scepticism. Rather, these obviously hyperbolic statements were used to illustrate the general point that the distortion of science in public debate can have dire consequences.

The broadcast then featured a reading from the Economist magazine which discussed the Republican campaign and the downfall of Todd Akin, which it viewed as being because of his rejection of science. The controversy over Akin included his belief that the bodies of women subjected to rape can shut down to pregnancy – equally as scientifically unproven, dangerous and perhaps as odious as Robyn Williams’ intentionally ridiculous examples in the introduction to the program. This example illustrated that outrageous statements regarding science were actually part of the real life political discourse during the US election. Robyn Williams’ interview with Professor Stephan Lewandowsky followed. There was no link made by the presenter or interviewee between the rhetorical questions at the beginning of the broadcast and the discussion of climate change scepticism. Professor Lewandowsky talked about his interest in scepticism more broadly before moving on to discuss his recent research findings into climate change scepticism.

On review, Audience and Consumer Affairs are satisfied that the program was in keeping with section 7.1 of the ABC Code of Practice. Nonetheless, we regret that you were offended by the program and would like to assure you that your comments are noted and have been conveyed to ABC Radio and The Science Show. Should you be dissatisfied with this response, you may be able to pursue your concerns with the Australian Communications and Media Authority, http://www.acma.gov.au .

Dear Jo,
As you know, I have been sharing the “send a pollie. a piece of my mind” (re the Junk-Science of the IPCC.) air-space with you for a few years now!
Also, just like you, I used to be a Greenie (& Science Show devotee)!
I don’t say this lightly. My late mum did her best to raise me as a single parent in the early 70′s, but alas, I too was abused. (This was by a stranger when we used to live in a house which used to stand on the same spot where the Bris. Children’s Court stands today!!)
I take extreme personal exception to this abomination of a mis-use of the public broadcaster by Robyn Williams, and in the coming days I will be sending a solicitor’s letter to the same (& the ABC.) demanding an immediate retraction, or else further action will follow.
I had put this vile incident behind me, though it occured some 40 years ago, and I’m extremely depressed that Robyn Williams is so desparate to try & re-claim some of the momentum he & his spent allies used to enjoy around the days of Bali ’07 & Copenhagen ’09 – that he has to go virtually as low as Saville did!!!
Yours ever sincerely,
Reformed Warmist of Logan.

Not to mention all the references to you needing to be tried for crimes against humanity like the Nuremberg trials – just because you don’t agree with them. Just remember the original Nazi Concentration camps were established for political dissidents who opposed National Socialism in Germany – just because they refused to abide by a state supported political view that they disagreed with or were unconvinced of.

Personally I find their tactics utterly repulsive. But I find that the latest set of messages – regardless of any caveats or the way they try to defend themselves – I find predictable.

Let’s leave it up to the people to make up their minds. If there’s one thing the great big tax on everything has shown us, the average aussie actually has a good enough bullsh!t filter which will at least pick up on the most stupid and clumsy smears.

Let them talk – after all, the damage to their cause to date has largely been triggered by their own stupidity and ignorance – combined with the excellent work of Jo and others who help to prevent the spin from superseding the facts.

So my advice is repeat what they have said far and wide and turn their words back on them. Don’t react in any radical way – just ensure that they are never allowed to forget what they said or what they deliberately implied.

Now I can see why you guys have so much trouble with climate science. It’s fairly obvious reading through these blog posts that virtually no one here seems capable of basic listening and comprehension. Being capable of understanding what has actually been said before going off on bizarre ravings that have nothing to do with reality seems such a trait of the far right. As someone once said (don’t know who):

If you could reason with the religious, they wouldn’t be religious.

Substitute religious for “fake climate skeptic” and you get the picture.

AGW is a religion not scepticism; scepticism is not advocating anything which has no proof.

The best explanation of AGW is that it is based on the Eden myth where a natural paradise prevails until mankind uses forbidden ‘knowledge’ in the form of fossil fuels and causes destruction to be wreaked upon them.

When you argue in favour of AGW that is basically what you are saying; just replace God with nature and Eden is the so-called natural paradise which existed before man destroyed it.

Anyway, why am I talking to you; you’re a troll, part of the pagan religion of AGW and therefore incapable of reason.

JFC: If you mean “listening means you will agree with what I said”, you are right. If you mean listening and then rejecting the data, you are wrong. There is a belief among climate change advocates (and many people in general) that if one listens to whatever the advocate says, the information will be so incredibly believable no one can possibly disagree. If they disagree, they did not actually hear the words. You confuse listening and agreeing, convincing argument and proclamations. There’s also precious little data ever presented and few valid arguments. There would need to a definition of terms, etc. all of which we rarely see from the climate change crowd. All of this is probably too much work, so name calling substitutes. Fire away with the data and we’ll see how much is incredibly believable.

” There’s also precious little data ever presented and few valid arguments. There would need to a definition of terms, etc. all of which we rarely see from the climate change crowd. All of this is probably too much work, so name calling substitutes. Fire away with the data and we’ll see how much is incredibly believable.”

Don’t be too hard on these poor Earth climate illiterates. It should be obvious by now that these poor souls only come here to have their masochistic needs satisfied. We should in kindness assist in their chosen therapy with plenty of red thumbs down. No need to even read the stuff.

This article appeared as if on cue, following my comment in a previous ABC thread.
Roland Tichy, Editor in Chief of the German business weekly Wirtschaftswoche responding to the shutting down of newspapers:

What the industry has done wrong?

Too many German media have been reduced to red-green re-education camps. He who eats meat, despoils world climate. Officials know better than you, what is good for you. Taxes must be increase, children must be sent to créche, because parents harm their babies as much as smoking does their health. Please don’t forget: The Rhine-tsunami threatened German nuclear power plants, Obama is God and he who is against the quota of women, also abuses migrants in the workplace. Many journalists have lost touch with the reality of life. That’s why people won’t read their fantasy orgasms.

I’ve work long hours, some of ‘em incredibly hard! to feed, educate and raise a family, well, 2 actually (Divorce can be managed by the way!) I have 4 kids, 1 cabinet maker (Apprenticeship completed), 1 electrician (2 year), 1 Carpenter (1st year), and the 4th wasted her time at high school, didn’t get the scores for uni and is now doing part time Law study to make up for it.

Is he seriously telling me that because I question the relationship, based on observations or the lack thereoff, of Co2 and climate and subsequently Human contribution to Climatic characteristics, and the motivation for ever increasing levels of Government and Authority to tax me, make laws to restrict me, make laws to restrict what my kids can do and think, that I’m the equivalent to kiddy fiddler?

Careful what you sling at us average joes, Robin. You may get a reaction you can’t live with.

I only have one think to warn Robin Williams about. Well it’s not publishable actually, in this age of oppression masquarading as political correctiness.

I do have teeth missing, caused by some people unhappy about my reactions to some of their actions towards me and mine.

He’ sailing a little to close to the wind on this, he needs to stop feeling so secure and start thinking!

I’m not big on brainwashing, just a personal thing, you might put it down to history being a “bad” infleunce.

And when the “elites” come out screaming and pinning the ills of the world on one or the other group, or a group with particular characteristics( which by the way have nothing to do with eash other), well it’s not long after divisions start to arrise, society fragments into tribalism of identity rather than united in values based on “proven to work” principles.

The media, opinions, argument and free thought are under attack (Freedom of speech). Instutions are under attack. The defence force aren’t allowed to hurt anyone in battle. That is soooo funny.

Defence force being investigated for abuse, Catholic church for abuse, community groups and associations will get lined up in these inquiry’s that will turn into a witch hunt and dismantle or dent their credibility incredibly.

Meanwhile the corridors of power are being infected with this mindset, which can only lead to the irrationality of though and decisions, the likes of which we can’t imagine. (Tax on air anyone?)

“Climate deniers” are grand children haters for not wanting to leave the planet in decent condition for their grandkids.

Education systems are being forced to waste resources on numbskulls that apparently have a “right” not to be dumb and stupid. LMAO

Just a few examples I could go on, and on, and on, and on

Well, as it turns out, there is enough of this warped thinking to threaten my country, my values, my independance and those I have instilled in my kids.

Proffessional help?, nah! All those who don’t recognise someone who’ll fight back need that help more then I do.

Don’t waste time helping me, I can look after myself and mine, thank you for asking anyway.

The kids of the supporters of the likes of Williams may need some help though?

I am really pissed off about this. The ABC have given up all pretence of even handedness or objectivity.
Williams described the recent article by former ABC boss as ‘drivel’ but of course could not say why.
I really am in a mood to hit back somehow … but how?
I will write some letters to various big wigs but what else?
If we abandon our principles and behave like leftists, for example, with the inevitable unruly protest they would love that as it would portray us in the light that they want.
Any ideas?

Well, just look at Jo Nova’s previous post, where a tired and predictable deception was trotted out for the gizzilionth time, and ask yourselves, “Are we really skeptical, or do we just not want to face facts?”.

The fact that the same old “no warming in xx years” is trotted out as though it actually means something indicates that you are not skeptical at all, but are just a loose knit group of people united by their dislike of AGW.

Yes Andy, you said it nicely. The “no warming period” vs “the warming period”. But if we weren’t in a warming trend, you’d expect to see equally long “cooling periods” – but we don’t. And that is because there is an underlying warming trend that is impossible to ignore.

Yes indeed, however you claim that rising levels of CO2 in the atmosphere cause increasing temperatures. That is manifestly not the case. Cyclical, natural, variations overpower any effects of CO2 as is the case right now.

You are being sly here. Nobody denies climate change, rising and falling temperatures, but the CO2 linkage is being disproved by the recent hiatus in the upward trend of temperature yet we have a steady rise in atmospheric CO2. You seem to think that the temperature rise will resume shortly based on your beliefs. What of the next set of natural variations that are coming if the long history of our planet is to be believed? You see, it is no use standing there proclaiming that if the temperature weren’t staying the same it would be going up.

There are obviously rather larger controlling factors on the global climate than man made CO2 but because you have no knowledge as to what they are you claim that they aren’t important. That is very like people using God to explain away things they don’t understand like say evolution. There is absolutely nothing in the ever changing temperature and climate that argues for man made CO2 being the cause. If there is bring it here so we can all understand.

If the data shows a warming trend then I agree warming is occurring. No question. If the data shows it.

But, what is causing it? Just because it is happening, doesn’t mean I caused it. So we now need proof of attribution. I don’t see you producing that proof. (And I am pretty sure I am not the first to request it).

The fact that the same old “no warming in xx years” is trotted out as though it actually means something indicates that you are not skeptical at all, but are just a loose knit group of people united by their dislike of AGW.

You’re such a wanker Brookes. Let me rephrase you.

“The fact that a little warming from the super El Nino of 1982 through to the super El Nino of 1998 (with 4 other moderate to strong El Ninos in between) was trotted out to claim proof of man made global climate catastrophe indicates that you are a typical pooffo pinko save the whales save the bears tree hugging cardigan wearing wannabe planet saver communist who would probably gladly buggerise a little kid if you thought that would save a snail or two and a colony of worms.”

Here is an article bringing our attention to a totally unacceptable and despicable behaviour by a couple of prominent people on the public purse, and all you do is try to excuse them by claiming we are faux sceptics.
In other words, the absence of condemnation by you tells me that you agree with these two abominable scum sucking pigs.

The cause of the super El Nino of 1982 was the heliocentric conjunction of Neptune and Uranus pushing in phase with the solar declinational tides in Spring into summer. The super El Nino of 1998 (with 4 other moderate to strong El Ninos in between) was the result of heliocentric conjunctions of Jupiter and Saturn with the still close alignment of Neptune/Uranus. Now that the time we pass these outer planets Jupiter December 3rd this year (watch the tornado outbreak generated in the upper Gulf of Mexico states, Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, on the 2nd and 3rd of December) are moving into the fall winter we will be seeing enhanced colder periods with heavy snows in the Northern winters. And with the earth passing Saturn now in the spring you will see more tornado outbreaks like the past two springs, like the Joplin tornadoes.

The connection in extreme weather is a planetary connection just like the past warming trend was, and neither has anything to do with CO2 trace gas changes from insignificant, to slightly less insignificant.

Maps for the locations of the storms and precips for the first week of December are available now on the site highlighted name link.

Jo, every “no warming in xx years” is deceptive. Every time it is said as though it implies that warming has stopped. And every time it turns out that warming hasn’t stopped, its just a pause (a natural variation). So while it is a true statement, it will lead the casual reader to draw the wrong conclusion, and to that extent it is deceptive.

If you were to say that there has been no statistically significant warming in the last xx years, and that the same was true for several equally long periods during the current warming trend, so that while interesting, it doesn’t mean that the warming trend has stopped, that would be less deceptive.

And Jo, it doesn’t have to be you who says it. You can simply quote someone else who said it and then fail to mention the caveats. You, me, and all the people on your blog know how it works, but a lot of ordinary people don’t, and the last thing they need is to be misled.

John,
You frequently challenge people to produce evidence. Here is a real challenge for you. Please provide the last word, scientifically-accepted, reasonably inarguable publications that show, one for each point:

1. That greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are producing a warming effect that is amplified by positive feedback, to the quantitative value of ???
2. That there is an established causal relationship between smoking cigarettes and lung cancer, amechanistic effect that is more than a strong statistical inference.
3. That small quantities of lead (Pb and its compounds)ingested by an infant will lower her/his IQ (or similar test of mental capacity).
4. That seaweed or kelp act as an effective fertiliser in agriculture by a mechanism that is understood.
5. That certain foods taken by mouth have the capacity to improve health by depleting bodily concentrations of anti-oxidants.
6. That more than 100,000 people were killed, or will die, from radioactive effects from the Chernobyl reactor explosion.
7. That more than 5% of the population of advanced countries like Australia will gain a benefit from tablet-type vitamin supplements to ordinary diets.
8. That farming using no man-made additional chemicals (let’s call it organic farming) produces higher food yields per hectare than “chemically fertilised” farming does.
9. That people have been harmed by the ingestion of genetically modified crops.

All that is needed is one reference to each dot point. The inclusion of an item on the list bears no relation to my personal studies or conclusions about the topic. That is, I am not maintaining here that smoking does or does not cause cancer. It’s your challenge to find the single, definitive paper that shows that it does.

Good luck, see you in about 50 years when you might have the answers to a couple of the questions if you work diligently. Because, frankly, you seem to be starting from a very low base of evidence.

9. That people have been harmed by the ingestion of genetically modified crops.

There’s no evidence of that happening in humans that I know about.
But if it takes years to find out, it is vacuous to point out that we don’t have any evidence of harm (yet).

In the meantime would you settle for rats instead?>>>”We conclude that these data highlight signs of hepatorenal toxicity, possibly due to the new pesticides specific to each GM corn.”

A good product sells itself. If GMOs are so good for us, why did the USA Ambassador advise the USA government to start trade wars with EU countries in retaliation for impeding the deployment of Monsanto’s GMO crops? Are these EU countries full of dolts who just don’t understand how safe these things are for humans? (In spite of not being entirely safe for rats.)

Why did the California campaign against labelling GMO food circulate a fake FDA quote with an illegitimate use of the FDA logo and completely get away with it? What powerful connections did that campaign have to evade prosecution for an act that lands other fraudsters in jail?

Of course labelling these things is pointless. Either they are safe, in which case it is not relevant they’ve been genetically modified, or else they are not safe, in which case they should not be on sale.

I think genetic engineering of food crops is a great idea with the potential to improve productivity and nutrition without using more arable land and without using as many pesticides. It would take the huge strides made by Norman Borlaug in the 1960s to a whole new level.
It’s a shame the biggest player in the business is a company that looks as dodgy as hell the more I hear about it.

The GMO Panel concludes that the authors’ claims, regarding new side effects indicating kidney and liver toxicity,
are not supported by the data provided in their paper. There is no new information that would lead it to reconsider its previous opinions on the three maize events MON810, MON863 and NK603, which concluded that there were no indications of adverse effects for human, animal health and the environment.

An older (2007) and recent paper (2012) from one of the same authors, Seralini, is refuted for the same lack of statistical rigour.

Not that I like to discuss that topic here, far too OT, but one need to be cautious with this kind of claims which seems to come always from the same authors… Not that Monsanto is any better, but as far as there are “neutral” observers, in this case the EFSA – which is not directly fond of GMO’s – these may be a better source of information…

- Indeed the warming has stopped, now for about 16 years. None of the current models has “projected” that and all will significantly (95% probability) fail if that lasts for another year.
- The warming 1910-1945 was as fast and high as the warming 1975-2000, the increase of CO2 in the first period was 10 ppmv, in the second period 50+ ppmv, without an observable fivefold effect. Thus what is the real influence of the extra increase of CO2?
- If the influence of the current record increase of CO2 over the past 16 years is completely suppressed by “some natural variability”, why doesn’t it is logical to assume that the same “some natural variability” is responsible for at least a (huge) part of the warming in the previous period(s)?

None of the global temperature increases over the past 16 year is significant within the noise of the year by year variability. BTW, I don’t want to get into a play with the begin and endpoint bias. One can show a cooling since 1998 and a warming since 1999, just a matter of changing the begin point of the trend. But it is all about significance…
Here an oversight of what the models do if they are aligned to the same temperature over the period 1961-1990:http://climateaudit.org/2009/07/07/rahm-centering-enhancing-successful-prediction/

3 things spring to mind. 1. Not a linear relationship. 2. Other forces also affect surface temps, not just GHGs. 3. Time to reach equilibrium state from a particular level of CO2 is at least decades.

1. CO2 levels even increased slightly exponential over at least the past 50 years. Its influence diminishes with its level, but one can assume at least a near-linear increase in temperature effect from CO2 forcing over the past 5 decades.
2. Right. Ocean currents, solar influences (not only direct solar forcing…), clouds,… None of them adequately resolved in the current climate models.
3. That is the case as well as for solar influences as for CO2. But the former is never mentioned. Moreover, with a steady increasing increase of CO2 levels, its effect should be continuously accelerating, not stall. That means that any natural cause that stopped the warming must be as strong cooling as the warming effect of the difference in CO2 levels over the past period…

Not just natural variability. Changes in manmade aerosols as well as the prolonged solar minimum will counter warming from GHG.

Ah, manmade aerosols, THE scapegoat of failing models. Have a look at a discussion in the early days on a “trusted” source: RealClimate, in times that not more than halve of my comments were sent to cyberspace:http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/07/climate-sensitivity-and-aerosol-forcings/ with my comment at #14.
The problem is that nobody knows what the real effect of aerosols is, even the sign (warming brown/black, cooling white) is unknown. The second problem is that a small effect of (cooling) aerosols means a small effect of CO2 and vv. The third problem is that aerosols may explain the 1945-1975 cooling with increasing SO2 emissions, but can’t explain the current standstill, as the average SO2 emissions didn’t increase over the past decade (there was only a shift from decreasing emissions in Western countries to increasing emissions in SE Asia). The fourth problem is that 90% of the aerosols are emitted in the NH, but that the NH is warming faster (land as well as oceans heat content) than de SH…
Together with the modeling of clouds, this is the largest cause of the 1:3 range in projections…

And we live in interesting times: if the sun directly or indirectly is responsible for the current standstill, then it is back to the drawing board for all models: solar influences are largely underestimated by current models… See:http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/pdf/StottEtAl.pdf

Well, as a (retired) process (automation) engineer, I have seen a lot of models failing, because some essential element was under- or overestimated or not even known… In this case, all models presume that 1 W/m2 change in GHGs has more or less the same effect (+/- 10%) as 1 W/m2 change in e.g. solar input. But that is a quite strange assumption if you know that CO2 has its highest effect in the troposphere (with abundant water cycles…) and IR radiation is absorbed/reflected in the upper fraction of a mm of the oceans (leading to more evaporation?). Sunlight has its largest effect in deeper surface layers of the oceans and in the lower stratosphere. The latter changes the temperature gradient between equator and poles, leading to changes in the position of the jet streams: more pole ward with high solar activity, more equator ward with lower activity. The jet stream position changes cloud and rain patterns and temperature over large parts of the earth…

If one abandons the “one factor for all” approach, it is easy to fit the temperature trend over the past century with halve the effect for CO2 (1.5°C for 2xCO2) by a firm reduction of the (uncertain) influence of human aerosols… See:http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/oxford.html

So you see, there are a lot of questions to be asked about the real effect of CO2 on the temperature increase of the past 150 years. Being critical of the current climate models and their attribution of the past warming mainly to humans is simply mandatory, if you have even the slightest interest in real science. Comparing people who question the current models with pedophiles, holocaust deniers, etc. is just a sad excess of those who have not the slightest interest in science…

Maybe I’m just hard to please but as a scientist I like to work out what is the bottom line.

The smaller comment at the top sounds eminently readable and at the time I write it had 15 TUs.

Well done.

The second, and larger, comment already has 5 TUs.

This is the Ferdinand I have come to know, with the embedded message that but for a fluke of nature we

would already be incinerated because of our profligate production of CO2.

So, after all the discussion saying that he agrees that models are not good science we have the payoff

line:

“If one abandons the “one factor for all” approach, it is easy to fit the temperature trend over the past century with halve the effect for CO2 (1.5°C for 2xCO2) by a firm reduction of the (uncertain) influence of human aerosols…”.

So the conclusion of all that was that “YES CO2 DID IT” but only “HALF” of it.

Readers of Ferdinand’s previous comments will recognise the pattern used to get the final message across.

1. Human CO2 output is rising as a result of fossil fuel combustion.

2. This leads to higher atmospheric CO2 levels.

3. This leads to increased atmospheric temperatures.

Today we have the new “confuser”, the aerosols, which may or may not be dampening the temperature rise but when their influence dies away, then and only then, will the real temperature rise occur.

The temperature rise is there, it’s just that it is hidden behind other factors.

I know, I have had several discussions here about the cause of the increase of CO2… Because I am a real skeptic: as skeptic about what (some) skeptics say as what (some) warmists say…

So, in my informed opinion:
- Humans are responsible for the observed increase of CO2 over the past 160 years (and yes, the CO2 data from Mauna Loa in recent times and from ice cores are reliable and the data collected by the late Ernst Beck are largely unreliable).
- CO2 has a -small- warming effect: some 0.9°C for a CO2 doubling, without feedbacks, based on reliable laboratory measurements.
- Current climate models are unreliable: too many positive feedbacks, including clouds which in reality are negative.
- Human aerosols were and still are used as escape by the models to fit the 1945-1975 cooling (and current standstill), while that is probably all natural (ocean currents -PDO?-). There is no way that human aerosols have such a cooling influence and even may have helped the warming in some countries (like the brown haze in India).
- That all means that – in my informed opinion – the real effect of 2xCO2 is somewhere between zero and 1.5°C for 2xCO2, which is largely beneficial (in combination with the extra CO2…) for humanity and nature.

Nice One, never heard of significancy? There is so little ocean heat content increase over the past decade, and that mostly by adjusting the ARGO floater data, that it is insignificant within the noise. Thus both statements are not mutually exclusive. Why the adjustments are always one-sided up is an interesting question: random errors are expected to be two-sided, but in global warming data they seem to be always resulting in upward adjustments…

But even on RealClimate I had no reaction on my objections against the use of human aerosols to fit the climate models over the 1945-1975 period with increasing CO2 levels, largely responsible for the huge 1:3 range of the model “projections”. Some toughts about that?

In further discussions, RC simply deleted most of my comments, even always on topic and polite. So I did give up to comment there. If you don’t have clear answers to comments and simply delete them, then some other than scientific reasons are at play…

My interest in the method you use to incriminate the man made CO2 effect is more of a defense of science on my part that relates to your method of quantifying man made CO2 in the atmosphere.

You cannot just assume and specify that Natural CO2 is totally stable to the point that man made CO2 is the only cause for increases in total atm CO2.

The natural CO2 cycle was rather stable over the past few million years: 800 kyr of ice core data recently confirmed by 2 million years of ocean sediment data. The resolution of the oldest data is of course very low, but increases over recent times. The Law Dome ice core data over the past 1,000 years have a resolution of ~20 years and are accurate to +/- 1.2 ppmv. So any one-year change of 40 ppmv or a sustained change of 2 ppmv over 20 years would be detected in that core.

All ice cores (Dome C: 800 kyr, Vostok: 420 kyr, Law Dome: 1 kyr) show a change of ~8 ppmv/°C. Henry’s Law shows a change of ~16 microatm of CO2 pressure in seawater at equilibrium with the atmosphere (~16 ppmv). But as a 1°C increase in temperature also increases vegetation growth, the global result is ~8 ppmv/°C over multi-decades (MWP-LIA) to multi-millennia.

If we may assume that the warming since the LIA to today is at maximum 1°C, then the maximum increase of CO2 since the LIA is 8 ppmv. But we see an increase of over 100 ppmv today, coinciding with the use of fossil fuels. The increase is measurable as well as in the atmosphere as in the ocean surfaces. The latter should get lower if the warming oceans were the source of the extra CO2.

The same for the reduction in 13C/12C ratio in the atmosphere as well as in the ocean surfaces…

Thus as neither the oceans or vegetation (the two fast huge sources/sinks) are the cause (both are net sinks for CO2), and volcanoes are a minor source and the increase in the atmosphere follows the human emissions at an incredible fixed rate, there is little doubt that humans are responsible for the increase.

You and others focus too much on the huge, mainly seasonal, natural CO2 cycle: but that is a cycle, quite equilibrated over a year: the average change over the seasons is globally 1°C and results in 5 ppmv change globally. Or again a small change of 5ppmv/°C, despite the huge flows (90 and 60 GtC) involved. Temperature fluctuations caused by El NiÑo etc. result in only about 4 ppmv/°C around the trend.

Which all doesn’t say that the human-made increase of CO2 has a huge influence. That is a complete different discussion…

It’s no wonder people like Robyn Williams get’s so fed up with people arguing to defend their ideology instead of examining the science.
97% of climate scientists disagree with a retired engineer that seems to be old enough not to care what happens to the future.

If you had looked at my CV, you should have seen that I was working for a better environment, long before that was Big Bussiness. And indeed I am old enough to have been an adept of the Club of Rome, until none of their dire predictions materialized. I have listened to the global cooling scare in the seventies, the acid rain scare in the eighties and the global warming scare in the nineties. On top of that, they spoiled my New Years Eve 1999/2000 with the millennium bug, by keeping us that night at work, while we were sure that there wouldn’t be any problems. So, I had my fair share of believing (except for the last one) in non-materializing scares.

My convertion to climate skepticism was the publication with much fanfare of the MBH “hockeystick”, replacing the common knowledge of that time, without any explanation. So, I did dig deeper into the science of global warming and was astonished by the lack of rigour of the climate models and the wide ranges of effects used for the same “data” like human aerosols and cloud feedbacks, as these were and are used as turning knobs to fit the models to the past temperature trend. If one should do that in the same way for a chemical process, I wouldn’t like to count the number of subsequent Seveso type and worse accidents…

You say that CO2 from nature has been stable and that man made CO2 has been the only recent input.

In terms of geologic time we can see a clearer picture.

Up until about twenty thousand years ago the Earth was in a 100,000 year long big freeze.

In practical terms this means that there is not going to be much natural circulation of CO2 from vegetation, oceans and atmosphere for the very obvious reason that the low temperatures present stopped most actiovity.

In New York Central Park for example the Ice Field was one and a half kilometers DEEP, not wide , deep!.

There is not much biological activity in that situation.

The warming over the last twenty thousand years has liberated a lot of trapped bio material including only recently a Wooly Mammoth together with vegetation in the tundra.

My continued criticism of your mathematics is based on the 3 factors you are trying to link:

1. Natural turnover of CO2 which is not estimated, let alone given an accurate measurement.
It is enormous and that is probably the only quantification that can be given to it.
ie. This quantity is not known.

2. Human CO2 input. This is relatively easy to estimate but I’m not sure whether it is a figure that is being misused by others to accentuate human output.
There is a way that is used that involves estimates of fossil fuel use by detailing coal, oil and gas production. That is a good idea but is liable to scientific misuse if the base populations of say India, China and Brazil are not accounted for. The reason I say this is that these huge populations do obviously use wood or local coal or even cow dung for cooking but are not included in the Fossil Fuel energy audit. This could give seriously skewed impressions of changes in Fossil Fuel use when in many cases people CO2 production is actually not increasing but just going from the unaccounted”village” lifestyle to electric powered cities.

An appearance of rising human CO2 output which is not actually there can be blamed for increased CO2 in the air.

3. The measurement of atmospheric CO2 levels is fairly accurate NOW, and IF done correctly.

Your thesis is that :

Item 1 plus Item 2 is proportional to Item 3.

Of those items there is no way that No1 can be used as you do. It is a rising quantity that is unknown.

Item 2 is OK to a point but as I pointed out there are possible flaws.

You cannot just arbitrarily delete Item 1 and say that rising human CO2 output is proportional to rising world CO2 levels.

The major factor has been deliberately left out of the assessment.

This makes your comment :

“- Humans are responsible for the observed increase of CO2 over the past 160 years (and yes, the CO2 data from Mauna Loa in recent times and from ice cores are reliable and the data collected by the late Ernst Beck are largely unreliable)”.

Hope people can follow this because I think that science deserves to be checked and there seems to be a problem in this analysis that eliminates natural CO2 production from scrutiny.

In response, let us begin with the “stability” of the CO2 levels over the past:

Ice cores show that there is a remarkable correlation between temperature and CO2 levels over all times, from multidecades to multimillennia.
That is the result of all parts of the carbon cycle, but we don’t know much of the changes in individual flows over colder and warmer periods. Only the final result: some 8 ppmv/°C.

In the recent period, some knowledge was built up, based on measurements of seawater pCO2, pH, total carbon; tall towers over land measuring CO2 fluxes in/out forests and cultivated land, 13C/12C changes, 14C/12C bomb spike decrease rate, oxygen level changes, etc… That led to rough estimates of global CO2 fluxes per year: some 90 GtC in/out of the oceans, of which ~40 GtC continuously flowing from equatorial upwelling places to permament polar sink places and ~50 gtC from the seasonal temperature changes, mainly in/out of the mid-latitude ocean surface layer. Further some 60 GtC in/out of the biosphere, mainly from/to the mid-latitude forests.

Of course that are estimates, based on observations and calculations with wide margins of error. But that is of no practical interest here:

What is of interest is not the turnover of the natural cycle, but the net result at the end of the year, after a full seasonal cycle. It doesn’t make one damn difference for the amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere if the natural cycle is 10 or 100 or 1000 GtC/year, as long as the sum of all inflows and the sum of all outflows are equal. Not one gram of CO2 will be added to or extracted from the atmosphere at the end of a year. But a lot of CO2 from the atmosphere would be exchanged with CO2 from other reservoirs: some 150 GtC of the 800 GtC in the atmosphere, or roughly 20% each year. That is what a lot of measurements show, including the rate of decrease of the 14C nuclear tests spike of the 1950′s…

Thus we know the natural turnover reasonably well, but again, that is not of interest for the amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere. Of interest is the difference in in/outflows of CO2 after a year. And that we know with quite good accuracy:

The increase in the atmosphere is known with quite high accuracy +/- 0.1 ppmv (0.2 GtC), the human emissions are known, based on fossil fuel sales (taxes…) with reasonable accuracy at +1/-0.5 GtC, probably slightly underestimated by under the counter sales. Thus we know the the difference between natural inputs and natural outputs quite well for each year in the past 50 years. For the past year (roughly):

Without knowing one individual natural flow of CO2, neither the sum of all natural in or outflows, the turnover, we know the difference and that is all we need to know: nature as a whole is a net sink for CO2. No matter if the sink is in the oceans only or land vegetation only or both, or land vegetation was a net source and the oceans a larger net sink, with or without the Pinatubo’s erupting or an El Niño heating up the oceans. In all of the past 50+ years, nature was a net sink for CO2… See:http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/dco2_em.jpg

I see you’re not a climate scientist – worse than that, you seems to be in denial of the data.

Indeed I am not a climate scientist, some new brand of science, still in its infancy of scientific rigour. It didn’t even excist when I was studying for engineer…

But I have a broad interest in science, including climate for some time. As I have said before, I have quite some experience with models, be it for chemical processes, not climate. But the same basic rules apply for both: If you don’t have the exact data and/or don’t know the exact actions and reactions involved, forget your model. You only fool yourself (as I have experienced a few times) and others.

But about the “warming has stopped”, I am in good company of climate scientists, which claim the same. See e.g. Dr. Phil Jones of Climategate fame in a Feb 2010 BBC interview:

Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming

Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level

They find that tropospheric temperature records must be at least 17 years long to discriminate between internal climate noise and the signal of human-caused changes in the chemical composition of the atmosphere.

As you hide behind a nickname, I don’t know your scientific background, but if some trend isn’t significant means that what you see may look as going upward or downward, but the real trend of the variable where you are interested in is obscured by (an)other variable(s) which influences the variability around the trend and therefore the short term trend itself. Thus the real trend may go up or down or be flat, you just don’t know…

Thanks for saying it out straight:
“Thus humans are the only cause of the increase…”
I know you say you are a skeptic but the key issue here is that the warmers need their keystone;
that Human CO2 is causing increases in atm CO2 to our detriment.
You are supporting that and I think the evaluation is incorrect.

KK, You need to make some distinctions in what is more or less proven/plausible/not plausible/impossible in climate matters.

That humans are the main cause of the CO2 increase in the atmosphere indeed is one of the cornerstones of the (C)(A)GW hypothesis. But only one. Even if that is true, one need to show how much influence that has on climate, the A in AGW and if that has catastrophic consequences, the C in CAGW. Admitting that humans are responsible for the increase in CO2 does say next to nothing about the result of the rest of the claims.

On the other side: because it is one of the cornerstones of (C)(A)GW, some skeptics focus on this point to prove, even against all evidence, that the increase must/may be not man made, as that falsifies all other points of the theory.

In my opinion, that is a wrong strategy: that humans are responsible for the increase in the atmosphere is based on all available evidence. All alternative explanations (even from Prof. Salby) fail on one or more observations. As the word says: even one ugly fact can destroy the nicest theory… Thus skeptics undermine their own position on other, more valid points by fixing on this one, which simply is a lost case.

Better is to focus on where the “consensus” is on shaky grounds: failing models, including little “A” in AGW, failing catastrophes, which don’t materialize…

Both of us are Engineers and that, funny as it may seem, actually makes us better qualified to comment on the Processes and Operation of Climate than actual Climate Scientists.

That idea is in opposition to some other commentators here, such as Noice, who believe that all wisdom comes from the anointed ones and SkS.

We all have our blind spots however, and the continued disagreement we have over the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere is at the heart of this.

All of the other stuff you have identified as part of the Climate System is very much on target and has been recognised as such by a huge number of ticks above.

The main issue is that you say that the current increase in world air CO2 levels is due to Man.

I concede that the level of human CO2 output is very constant and stable and rising; there is no doubt about that.

Even so, the level of human turnover of CO2 is still about one twentieth of that of Nature in the biosphere, and that is approximate, and I believe capable of substantial swing up and down.

Any swing, and I am not talking about annual seasonal variations, could be on a scale from 1 to 10 to 100 or 1000 years because orbital mechanics operates on geologic time scales.

Orbital mechanics is mentioned because it triggers vulcanism and atmospheric temperature changes that can change the amount of CO2 from nature substantially and continue that for long periods.

Who is to say that in 50 years time the current cycle, whatever it is, will not turn around and lead to a reduction in atmospheric CO2?

I used to make very harsh comments about your posts because they had all of the signs of being typical Warmer comments where much was said to create agreement and then, the core point that “man did it” would be dumped somewhere in the discussion.

It seems more likely that you have been overwhelmed by information saturation at the C12 – C13 level and could gain from looking at the bigger picture influences on CO2 expression and absorption on Earth.

Can you conclusive show me how you have managed to eliminate Natural CO2 from the analysis of atmospheric CO2?

Just to illustrate the point can I do the same as you have done, but in reverse?

“My thesis is that the real CO2 level rise is being hidden by the abrupt halt of all sub – oceanic volcanic activity due to a lessening of Orbital Mechanics influences.
The natural sequestration that was built up to deal with the CO2 from nature is now absorbing more of Human Origin CO2 than the normal proportioning would justify.
This is artificially giving the appearance that CO2 is not rising at source.
When sequestration equilibrium is reached in 5 years there will be a surge of CO2 that reflects the real CO2 levels”

That is my invented thesis on CO2.

KK

ps. There is also a lot of concern about the use of the meme “for every “doubling” of CO2 there is x degree C rise in atmospheric temperature”. There is a lot of doubt about how this is specified since there is natural sequestration going on which deals with excess CO2 in about 5 years max. Too many unquantified factors.

I don’t know of any natural process that is capable of increasing or decreasing CO2 levels at such an incredible fixed rate: most natural processes (temperature, volcanoes, ocean flows,…) all show a variability much larger than what is seen in the CO2 data. See e.g. the ratio between temperature and CO2 levels over the same time span:http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/temp_co2_1900_2004.jpg

Although there still is some correlation, because both temperature and CO2 levels go up in that time span, the graph shows that a huge temperature change of near halve the scale has very little effect on CO2 levels on short term (about 4-5 ppmv/°C over 1-3 years), but on the full 100+ years it should have a huge effect (over 100 ppmv/°C) and then back to a lower effect of 8 ppmv/°C on very long periods (multi-decades to multi-millennia) as seen in ice cores. That is near impossible.

Further any natural process causing the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere, should follow the human emissions with an incredible exact ratio in quantity, its 13C/12C ratio and its lack of 14C. Such a natural process simply doesn’t exist. And last, but not least, where should the emissions of CO2 go, if nature and humans both add some extra CO2 to the atmosphere?

Neither oceans or volcanoes (both have a higher 13C/12C ratio than the atmosphere) or vegetation (the oxygen balance proves that vegetation is a net sink for CO2) can be the source of the extra CO2…

Two final points:
- human emissions are not a part of a cycle, they are mostly one-way additions, but are in part sequestered in the natural cycle, in ratio to the total difference of the current CO2 level to the temperature dictated dynamic equilibrium level.
- the excess removal rate has not a 5 years half time: that is the turnover rate, or the exchange rate of CO2 in the atmosphere with CO2 of other reservoirs, but that doesn’t change the total amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. Not to be confounded with the excess removal rate of CO2 above equilibrium. The current removal of CO2 is about 4 GtC/yr, while the excess CO2 above equilibrium is ~100 ppmv or ~210 GtC. That gives an e-fold removal time of 210/4 = 52.5 years or a half life time of ~40 years.

You have certainly covered a lot of detail in you exploration of CO2 cycles.

I think I have said this before, long time ago , that I wish I could write as well as you do in another language, French or German.

You comment that the rate of increase in atmospheric CO2 runs in parallel with the human emissions and this therefore, looks like a match. Ferdinand, you are an engineer and I don’t think that looking like a match on the graphs is a good enough reason to say that there is Causation linking the two items.
The two things you have linked are:

1. The increase in CO2 measured.

2. The increased output of human CO2 from fossil fuels.

Unfortunately there are many factors standing between those two.

a. Orbital mechanics of the solar system controls vulcanism and undersea rents that express unknown quantities of CO2. Also controls world temperatures which lead to changes in CO2 levels.

b. Human origin CO2 is sequestered at exactly the same rate as Natural Origin CO2 and does not build up separately to natural CO2.

c. The oceans have a massive store of CO2 dissolved that is 50 times larger than the amount stored in the atmosphere.

I suspect that most chemists would seriously question your statement that :

“human emissions are not a part of a cycle, they are mostly one-way additions,”

In fact, Human Origin CO2 has to be dealt with chemically in the same way as natural Origin CO2.

Your “blockage” on this point is a concern for me and the fact that ALL of your assumptions just happen to increase the “Guilt Factor” for man made CO2 points to one of two possibilities.

1. You are a Warmer or have something to gain by keeping the CO2 thing alive

or

2. You are caught up a blind alley on this C12 C13 C14 thing and you are overlooking all of the other evidence and uncertainty in quantities.

A short (?) reply, as I have the impression that not many are listening here anymore…

a. Orbital mechanics of the solar system controls vulcanism and undersea rents that express unknown quantities of CO2. Also controls world temperatures which lead to changes in CO2 levels.

Agreed, but the influence of temperature on CO2 levels (including orbital changes) over the past few million years doesn’t show more than 8 ppmv/°C change. Volcanic eruptions like the Pinatubo only show a dip in CO2 increase rate: the subsequent cooling had more influence than the amount of CO2 released… Undersea volcanoes may play a role, but that isn’t even visible in CO2 levels over the past, compared to temperature…

Further, all natural processes show a huge variability, but the increase in the atmosphere does follow the emissions with an incredible fixed rate over the past 160 years, only disturbed by temperature fluctuations over a period of 1-3 years. Again, if you can show me a natural process of any kind that can mimic the human emissions in such a way, I may change my mind…

b. Human origin CO2 is sequestered at exactly the same rate as Natural Origin CO2 and does not build up separately to natural CO2.

Agreed, but it is material impossible to have one-way human emissions ánd a surplus from the natural cycle. That is only possible when the increase in the atmosphere was larger than what humans emit alone, not seen in the past 50 years. The fact that the increase in the atmosphere is less than what is emitted by humans, shows that the natural cycle is more sink than source, thus nature is not the cause of the increase…

c. The oceans have a massive store of CO2 dissolved that is 50 times larger than the amount stored in the atmosphere.

Agreed, but that is not relevant at all. As long as there is no exchange between atmosphere and (deep) oceans, nothing happens. And if there is exhange: as long as the sums of inflows and the sum of outflows of the exchanges are equal, nothing happens with the total amount in the atmosphere. Only the difference between these two sums of flows makes that there is an increase or decrease or flat trend of CO2 in the atmosphere… And ocean measurements show that the oceans are a net sink for CO2…

human emissions are not a part of a cycle, they are mostly one-way additions

I should have added “they are not part of a human cycle” to make it clear that most of what we emit is additional to the natural cycle. The natural cycle reacts on any (natural or human) increase in the atmosphere with reduced releases at the ocean upwelling places and increased uptake at the ocean sink places. And an increase by plant uptake. But the uptake doesn’t double for a 100% increase of total CO2, it increases only 50-55%. The rest stays in the atmosphere. As humans emit CO2 in steadily increasing rates, the increase rate in the atmosphere is increasing too and so is the sink rate.

Humans have added some 370 GtC as CO2 over the past 160 years directly into the atmosphere. The atmospheric content increased with 210 GtC. Thus some 160 GtC CO2 was absorbed somewhere. There is simply no room for any extra natural CO2 releases, except if some extra natural sink did grow large enough to absorb the extra natural and halve the human releases (as total quantity, not as original molecules), but the natural part then is only more turnover, not a real increase.

1. You are a Warmer or have something to gain by keeping the CO2 thing alive
or
2. You are caught up a blind alley on this C12 C13 C14 thing and you are overlooking all of the other evidence and uncertainty in quantities.

Wow, what an accusation…
I am a luke-warmer. As said before, I am pretty sure that the increase of CO2 is human-induced and that that will give some warming. But I am also sure that that will be mostly beneficial and without dare consequences.
Further, while there is uncertainty in the quantities and flows involved, everything what is known points to human induced CO2. Nothing contradicts that hypothesis. But every alternative explanation I have heard of conflicts with one or more observations…

So warming hasn’t stopped, it just “paused” and that’s a natural variation? Would that not mean that nature is tougher than CO2? Or that without CO2 we would be heading for a very cold period–Irish potato famine type cooling period? How is this a bad thing to avoid the natural cooling?

One John’s side, 0.001 degrees C increase is enough to prove continued, catastrophic, runaway warming, but he and his would still not be convinced of cooling if glaciers were building over their heads.

Using the language of John’s cronies:

No reasonable person can look at the data and say with any honesty that the current trend is upward.

No reasonable person can honestly say that CO2 overpowers natural cycles while maintaining that natural cycles are currently overwhelming the CO2 effect.

No reasonable person can honestly insist that his opponents cite only peer reviewed literature while providing evidence with no attribution or from non-peer reviewed articles.

Hence, anyone who does any of the above is neither reasonable nor honest.

This very ordinary fellow with a bad case of cranio-tiltitus and, paradoxically, signs of an occluded bile duct, seems to be losing a wrestle with quite simple statistics of a first year level.
Jo’s reasoned analysis is spot on, it needs no correction, least of all by his repetitious nonsense. It adds nothing.

And everything I said about that was accurate – there has been no significant warming since 2001. I haven’t said “the world cooled”. Arguably I could have said there has been no warming for even longer time spans.

JB you seem a little confused. Those of us who find the alarmist variety of AGW unconvincing, not only on theoretical grounds, but on the inadequacy of the temperature data are only skeptical about the validity of the alarmist position. Theoretical grounds? Without positive feedback the effect of higher concentrations of atmospheric CO2 can have little effect, certainly not a runaway effect on the Earth’s temperature. Here, in scientifically informed company, is the conclusion that many of we “AGW skeptics” have come to:

Global Warming by Roy Spencer.

“Global warming” refers to the global-average temperature increase that has been observed over the last one hundred years or more. But to many politicians and the public, the term carries the implication that mankind is responsible for that warming. This website describes evidence from my group’s government-funded research that suggests global warming is mostly natural, and that the climate system is quite insensitive to humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions and aerosol pollution.

Believe it or not, very little research has ever been funded to search for natural mechanisms of warming…it has simply been assumed that global warming is manmade. This assumption is rather easy for scientists since we do not have enough accurate global data for a long enough period of time to see whether there are natural warming mechanisms at work.”

Compare his CV (below) wrt to climate science with say Robyn Williams or even most AGW alarmist climatologists.

Dr. Roy Spencer

Principal Research Scientist, University of Alabama in Huntsville, University of Alabama in Huntsville

Dr. Roy Spencer is a principal research scientist for University of Alabama in Huntsville. In the past, he has served as Senior Scientist for Climate Studies at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, where here he directed research into the development and application of satellite passive microwave remote sensing techniques for measuring global temperature, water vapor, and precipitation. He currently is the U.S. Science Team Leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR-E) on NASA’s Aqua satellite. Dr. Spencer is the recipient of NASA’s Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement and the American Meteorological Society’s Special Award for his satellite-based temperature monitoring work. He is the author of numerous scientific articles that have appeared in Science, Nature, Journal of Climate, Monthly Weather Review, Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology, Journal of Climate and Applied Meteorology, Remote Sensing Reviews, Advances in Space Research, and Climatic Change. Dr. Spencer received his Ph.D. in Meteorology from the University of Wisconsin in 1981

First, credit to you in prior post where you implicitly accept warming has paused. In your own words.

Oh yes, its stalled, just like its stalled many times in the past – but, surprise surprise, after each stall it just keeps rising. Much like this undead “skeptic” argument.

You don’t think this observation is important, I beg to differ. For me it is important in terms of trying to make sense of this tedious issue and trying to develop an informed opinion. We were promised hockey sticks, unprecedented warming that the signal was predominantly man made. As a luke warmer, my policy inclination is towards adaptation as opposed to mitigation; particularly since I anticipate that we are, in good time, going to move away from fossil fuels eventually in a generation or 2 anyway. The one thing that would swing me is compelling evidence that CAGW is real and the ‘A’ in AGW is potent, and the ‘C’ in CAGW is likely. The lull in temps doesn’t falsify anything, yet, but it is a serious body blow.

Well Brookes – apparently your job today is to support the proposal that myself and others on this blog are similar to paedophiles.
You disgust me, and if I were Jo I’d remove your trolling response and all replies (including this one) from this blog entry.
Don’t bother replying – I’m done with you.

John I always read your comments and they are often informative and helpful. But you just lost me mate. Your comment is the intellectual equivalent of the teenagers excuse as to why they didn’t make their bed. “O Dad she hasn’t so why should I”. Pathetic. And your failure to condemn an outrageous slur against the ethics and intelligence of many fine people who happen to disagree with you lowers you a considerable number of notches. No credibility.

The fact that the same old “no warming in xx years” is trotted out as though it actually means something indicates that you are not skeptical at all, but are just a loose knit group of people united by their dislike of AGW.

You aren’t logical.

Firstly, agreement on an undeniable bleeding obvious counterpoint to global warming, hardly indicates a lack of scepticism of global warming; so your charge is a silly non sequitur.

Secondly, we never claimed to be highly organized; that is the warmists’ claim – along with our being paid by big oil. I’m quite happy to be ‘loose’, a free agent.

Thirdly, the suspension of warming for 15 years does mean something. It means that the models are flawed. This was not supposed to happen.

Fourthly, your saying that we are united by our dislike of AGW (actually CAGW) is like saying that atheists (unbelievers) are united by their dislike of God!

Fifth, like Robyn Williams, you think it reasonable to justify your scientific position by sliming your detractors. How does that test your science and deem it sound?

One other thing, do you know your pompousness is really irritating? If that’s what you are trying to achieve, you’re on a roll.

A cascade of logical fallacies from a person who claims to uphold the value of reason in scientific argument.
Love the claim that there is no evidence that leftists ever reject the majority view held by scientific specialists.

Both Lewandowsky and Williams are arrogant propagandists; they are elitists in ego only but nonetheless assume a superiority over any contrary viewpoint.

Such otherwise worthless people thrive in the current climate with a government intent on maintaining power at any price or cost to standards; that attitude taints society generally and science in particular where hubris ridden loons can basically say and do what they please because there is no consquence.

Brian, no one ever asked before. But it is my job to make sure that everyone involved in teaching 1st year physics knows where they should be and what they should be doing. Not very high flying, but someone has to do it…

…it is my job to make sure that everyone involved in teaching 1st year physics knows where they should be and what they should be doing. Not very high flying, but someone has to do it…

Do you mean to say that highly educated professionals who are supposed to be teaching young adults at a university wouldn’t know what they are doing, or where they should be, without your help?
No wonder we are pissing billions down the education toilet without perceptible results.

My my John, I always suspected you were a useless parasitic oxygen thief on the taxpayer teat. Now I know for sure.

How does it feel to be a person who exists on the generosity of others, who doesn’t do or contribute anything meaningful and who isn’t self sufficient?
Each fortnight when some of the taxpayers hard earned lands in your bank account, do you sometimes think about being a useless parasite on the public teat or does it just come naturally to you?
I’m guessing you haven’t even given it a thought. Yet here you are supporting a side that wishes to tell the rest of us how we should live our lives.

Have you EVER had a REAL job John, you know, something simple but necessary like manning a check-out at the supermarket or working at a servo where people buy an essential good or driving a bus so people can get to work etc etc?

Here lies John Brookes, a misguided soul who never experienced real life by never really leaving school.

Make a change John, join the real life, get a real job, contribute to society, you’d be amazed how liberating it is. There’s good honest living to be made in your very own backyard. Get a job at a mine, help dig resources PEOPLE NEED. Your self-esteem will sky rocket and you’ll finally become……..A MAN.

We don’t know whether John is being self-effacing, and being modest about his position in life.

He could, for example, be responsible to designing and establishing the timetable for the entire science faculty. All those stroppy students who have extra-mural jobs or activities that must take second place to attending lectures or tutorials. And the even stroppier lecturers who simply MUST have that particular 300 seat lecturer theatre, even though it is right across campus from all of the other science lecture theatres, and half the students won’t bother to take the walk.

I had a project on this very subject when I was at university in London, and I can vouch that it is not a simple exercise.

On the other hand, he could be the janitor … from what he has said, we don’t actually know.

I did check what John did (UWA have a searchable staff directory and it’s easy enough to find out what sort of things he is doing there) but my description of that was unacceptable to Jo.

That was because the social nuances of certain words in proximity can lead readers to jump to the wrong conclusion. I admit that it was my intent to illustrate how an innocent meaning of what is written is often pushed aside and the worst thought, especially of those considered to be on the other side.

Authors may “incite” in such a way deliberately or inadvertantly.

It’s up to the readers and listeners to interpret the words. Without prejudice.

Almost forgot pseudo academic Brooksie … :LOL: my head is light from the thought but at least I actually was a proper academic lecturer … I would have fed you your ass if you’d come to me to “make sure that everyone involved in teaching … knows where they should be and what they should be doing.” Now go get my coffee, bitch.

One could be excused for confusing “y” with “i”: “Although Robyn Williams graduated with a Bachelor of Science (Honours) in England, he admits to having spent as much time acting as he has studying. Early in his career he made guest appearances in The Goodies, Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Dr Who and stood in for Tom Jones for four months in his TV series.”

Well this Pommy import certainly is virus of dramatic sorts. Who was he in Dr Who ? Of course a bloody Dahlec !(hope I spelt it right as not being a warmist my education must be lacking at 80 ! Some of these so called “academics” only have letters after their title just to indicate what work they are unable to master. Get a life or go home.

More of a guideline, really. However, it gets trotted out when someone mentions ‘Nazi’ in any debate, in much the same way as ‘denier’ is . It it is used to stifle debate, because anything you say afterwards is clearly bunk. Rather like arguing from authority, really.

AGW promoters and their handlers are desperate, and for good reason. They are losing the public debate, after sixty-seven years (2012-1945 = 67 yrs) of quietly manipulation science to promote a tyrannical one-world government under the United Nations. Climategate first exposed this plot in late Nov 2009

Good question, Sonny.
Unfortunately we won’t, our economies will of course be completely ruined, just less effectively than intended.

Meanwhile the IMF and World Bank will continue to facilitate the corporate raiding of Developing countries, the US and the EU edifice will continue to teeter on the precipice before a spectacular fall, and failed left wing politicians will still continue to slink off to the UN to die (with their Swiss Bank accounts filled with ill gotten blood money for selling their countrymen down the S bend). In other words, all will be right with the world.

But deceit will not conquer the force of creation and destruction [1] that

a.) Made our elements
b.) Birthed the world ~5.0 Gyr ago
c.) Energized the origin of life ~3.5 Gry ago
d.) Sustained the evolution of life to the present moment
e.) Endowed mankind with unusual talents and unalienable rights [2], and
f.) Became the world’s first weapon of mass destruction on 6 Aug 1945 and 9 Aug 1945 !

Frightened Allied leaders agreed to join the United Nations on 24 Oct 1945, perhaps unaware the USSR conquered and then hid information about Japan’s atomic bomb facility in Konan, Korea that exploded its first atomic bomb on 12 Aug 1945 [3].

UN leaders foolishly tried to hide the force of creation and destruction [1] and compromise the unalienable rights that force bestowed on mankind [3].

The UN’s Orwellian one-world government will be defeated!- Oliver K. Manuel

“A Congressional Research Service Report shows that from fiscal 2008 through 2012 the federal government spent $68.4 billion to fight the phantom known as anthropologic global warming (AGW), or man-induced climate change.”

That is $68,400,000,000 from the USA alone, plus additional billions of other currencies worldwide to try to hide the all powerful force of creation and destruction [1] that endowed mankind with unusual talents and unalienable rights [2], and will ultimately defeat the UN’s core Agenda 21 plan [3] for world domination, . . .

A much happier ending than George Orwell described when he warned us of this rising world tyrant in 1948 [4].

One neutron was captured by one U-235 atom on 6 Aug 1945 and triggered a chain-reaction that destroyed Hiroshima, revealing mankind’s first brief glimpse of the powerful force of destruction and creation [1]:

“One day in August 1945 while standing in the ruins of Hiroshima, I became overwhelmed by the power of nuclear energy.”

“The sight before my eyes was just like the end of the world, but I also felt that the beginning of the world may have been just like this.” – PKK [2, p.2]

PKK (Paul Kazuo Kuroda) became my research mentor in 1960 and assigned this research topic: “The origin of the solar system and its elements”

I suspect Kuroda knew, or at least suspected, the answer from his visit to Hiroshima in Aug 1945. He did not tell me the answer (the Sun made our elements and birthed the solar system), but he probably knew D.D. Sabu (another former student of PKK) and I would eventually figure it out. We did in 1975 [3].

Kuroda published the story of his 1945 visit to Hiroshima in 1982 [2].

When we finally grasped neutron repulsion in 2000, we published the evidence of the cover of the Proceedings of a 1999 ACS Symposium organized by Glenn T. Seaborg and me [4].

…yet another reason why the ABC should be policed under the same regulatory framework as commercial broadcasters.
Clearly the ABC’s internal processes and self-assessment regime doesn’t achieve accountability.

It has a few problems in that it mangles punctuation marks for example replacing ” with ? or other gobbledegook. Also ZERO formatting such as emphasis and no live links. It does have the advantage of rapid auto acknowledgement and provision of a case number.
Alternatively, you can write a letter addressed to the processing office in Sydney:

Sorry Phillip, If you describe your attributes as including most of the above, then it is hard to contemplate that you could be a successful scientist.
For a start, finding employment in a place that matters would be difficult with that description on a c.v. Such bodies as would like the c.v. do work that mostly does not matter, or is even negative in progress. I have in mind a number of NGOs like Greenpeace, Union of Concerned Scientists, IPCC, etc.
Second, if you believe the planet needs to be saved, when there is no evidence that action is needed to keep it from destruction, you display a mind that makes the same mistake as many these days, your beliefs or emotions being put on a plane higher than evidence.
You might gain some benefit from reading some of the ground-breaking scientific publications from say 1890-1940, to better understand how those succesful scientific brains worked.

My stock reply to eager young people trying to get a few dollars out of me to save the environment is pleasantly stated but confronting content wise.

I inform them that I have difficulty coping on my present income and that if they really felt so strongly about “the cause” then obviously they would get a job and earn income that they could donate themselves.

Yep, there is a nasty new meme in play — tone down the scare but demonise opponents. That article is rank propaganda, pure politics by division. Robin Williams and his editorial staff should be sacked.

Paedophile, denier, shill for big oil, etc, are heavy insults, but make no mistake, the worst of the worst in the mind of Lew and Williams and many academics and ABC fans is “supporter of free market”. If I came out as a paedophile at work, I could still find some colleagues at Uni rationalizing my actions, but if I said that I am in favor of free market and liberalism (and perhaps even a Bolt reader), that’s it, that’d be the end of my professional and social life in Australian unis.

I wouldn’t get too exercised by the pedophile reference myself. They were just saying that claiming “pedophilia is good for the victim” is as incorrect as claiming “the globe isn’t warming” or “the climate isn’t as sensitive to CO2 as the IPCC claim” (they were unclear on which, perhaps deliberately so – or perhaps they don’t understand the difference).

The reason this analogy was chosen probably has as much to do with the Mann vs National Enquirer case, where the same sophistry reversed will be used as a defence. “We weren’t calling you a pedophile we were just alluding to a similar situation”. However the fact that Williams (no doubt with some help from Prof L.) did this does suggest he’s taken sides and is stirring (and is being a bit dopey because he is legitimating the National Enquirer defence).

The thing to gun for here is the use of Prof L. to criticise those that misuse science for ideological reasons to justify their cause. The fact the Prof L. recently did exactly this with his publication on climate blogs (and demonstrated what a lightweight social scientist he is) should be what should be shoved up the science establishment in the ABC.

I’ve posted a (somewhat more circumspect) comment to this effect over at the ABC site, but I note no comments have yet been released from moderation.

In the end the only way to deal with poor quality academics is to cut off their oxygen. Did any of you Aussies have a go at closing down his funding streams on the basis of poor ethical research activity? While he’s bringing in those research grants (and column inches) the UWA will love him.

Williams attributed those views- about pedophilia, treating asthma with asbestos, encouraging crack-cocaine use as part of normal development- to the same group who were the subject of the referenced Economist article- conservative republicans in the US Congress, and later he extended the reference to conservatives as a whole.
It was an ugly smear, and was intended to be so.

Yes, believe it or not, pedophiles do delude themselves that what they are doing is not harmful. The worst of them fool themselves into thinking the kids will benefit from it. Why? So that they can continue their activities without feeling bad about it.

You only deny that the emission of vast amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere may be bad for the planet – because you want to keep doing it without feeling bad about it.

That is the extent of the metaphor. No one is accusing you of being Jimmy Saville.

You only deny that the emission of vast amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere may be bad for the planet – because you want to keep doing it without feeling bad about it.

OK then John, call me what you will, attribute any motive you can dream up for my skepticism — but I’ll just throw it back in your face from now on. To me this escalation is a declaration of war. I’m ready to let the future determine whether I’m right or wrong. I’m ready to meet you head-on any day. You cannot withstand a debate on the merit of your position and you know it.

Actually, what pedophiles do is harmful because we said so. I suppose in the sense that they live outside the dictates of society in general does make them a possible metaphor for “deniers” (though it is not clear if climate change belief is actually within the societal norm or not). The choice of the term is where the problem lies. I could call you a misguided individual who we should have some pity on, or I could call you something the moderator will definitely snip (I’m not including it, of course). The snipped term would be to insult the daylights out of you and hope to convince you to shut up and go away. The other statement could be condescending or not. Actually, you should simply be referred to as “John” since that’s what names are for. Then we can discuss your proposition that climate change is real (without quoting from a web site that named itself after a gun, mind you). Same is true for say “Roy”. We call him “Roy” and then we discuss his theories and objections. Using very nasty names is not about science. It’s about third grade on the playground.
Oh, and I am all for feeding the “trolls” (not my term–I just use your name) because they allow me to clarify my beliefs and research the behaviour of the climate change people. Everyone can provide useful knowledge, be it accurate or inaccurate. Sometimes it’s just entertaining.

The reason you are finding this a difficult argument to follow is that you are not separating the moral arguments from the scientific. People may take the moral position that more CO2 in the atmosphere is a bad thing for a whole range of reasons, some sensible some not so. I might think it bad because of the depletion of finite resources involved.

This is essentially separate from being skeptical about scientific propositions related to what happens when CO2 concentrations increase, and seeking to debate those.

To draw an analogy between a moral proposition (pedophilia is bad) and a scientific proposition (climate sensitivity to CO2 is lower than the IPCC claims) is sophistry design to invoke guilt by association.

To give a more appropriate scientific analogy we might compare those who are skeptical about the IPCC’s position on climate sensitivity with those that are skeptical about the low reported incidence of child molestation by women. While both are likely to be controversial positions among some sectors of the community they can be seen for what they both are – legitimate matters for scientific inquiry.

So try and separate your moral positions from scientific inquiry and you’ll understand better what is being said.

No. No. No. I only disbelieve what does not add up scientifically. I am not motivated by the desire to continue to do it without feeling bad about it. I want there to be substance to the proposals of Governments which alter the way we live and impoverish the middle class and more deeply impoverish the already impoverished.

I am motivated to know the truth and to have policies established on the basis of verifiable data.

Very good logical point John now lets take that thought to its logical conclusions.

People like you believe in AGW so to you it is a religious faith……..

Catholic priests believe in God (religious faith) and a lot of them are kiddie fiddlers so by logical extension you are one as well.

Now think about it John……………you demand others reduce their lifestyles so that you may maintain yours, you support the ideas that the impoverished on this planet are denied access to a cheap, abundant and reliable fuel source knowing full well that this descision will cause the death of millions but still you deny them just so as you can continue to use the very same.

Your faith compels you to support the implementation of crippling taxes that the impoverished cannot afford, your faith requires you to support the shutting down of businesses that your faith deems not worthy knowing full well that these actions will further impoverish the most needy in our community.

Some may call me a paedophile and i am not sure what i should call you but i believe your actions should see you in the hage facing charges against humanity.

UWA has yet to find any evidence of “research misconduct”, at least as at 20th September, when Climate Depot’s Marc Morano received the letter below from UWA Professor Robyn Owens, Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research). It was a response to his reply to an unsolicited email from Lewandowsky about publicly releasing blogger site info.

“1.The focus of Professor Lewandowsky’s research relates directly to his interest and expertise in scepticism and the updating of memory. As such, the topic of this paper of is well within his remit and consistent with the University’s Code of Ethics and in particular the academic freedom of staff;

2.The research was undertaken in a manner compliant with the University’s strict Human Ethics approval;

3.A review of all correspondence to the blog sites was undertaken confirming the contact with blog sites;

4.The paper has been peer-reviewed and accepted [but yet to be published] in a high quality, international journal.”

That, however, is not the end of the matter. Questions are still being raised about various issues, including the UWA Ethics Committee’s approval process.

This is an outrageous slur and you should be sacked instantly for spewing this nonsense from the taxpayer funded public service.
This is not a private conduit for ones own twisted, bigotted theories-SHAME

But the bitter irony comes from one I count, still, as my best friend. He is a convinced warmist, and yet he accuses US of being shrill. He has never at any time attempted to offer the slightest reason for his position and expects me to simply accept or to “agree to differ”.

With all due respect, Jo, I’m not sure that “protest” to the ABC is the route to follow. I suspect that – not unlike like the BBC Trust (and Canada’s CBC “Ombudsman”) – the powers that be will circle the wagons in support of such scientifically illiterate on-air mavens.

They are desperately flinging as much mud as they can in the hope that some will stick. But in so doing, they completely underestimate the intelligence and (increasingly accurate) BS detectors of John and Jane Q. Public.

Perhaps we should pity the likes of Williams and Lewandowsky whose climate hypochondria [h/t Eduardo Zorita] and carbon fetish [h/t Matt Ridley] are the inevitable product of a congenitally profound deficiency in the critical thinking skills department.

Poor Williams’ irrational fear of a possible future, as even he has acknowledged – albeit perhaps somewhat inadvertently – by his:

may be clear and urgent problems

strongly suggests that, for all intents and purposes, he’s either brain-dead or brainwashed. I suggest we let him take his pick

Long ago and far away, in one of my previous incarnations, I was involved in the field of services to people with developmental handicaps. So I’ve met many children and adults who at one time were labelled as “mentally retarded”. And I can honestly say that not a single one of these individuals was as slow a learner as Williams and Lewandowsky – and their respective coteries of acolytes and lesser lights – are proving themselves to be.

But, as an antidote to the ire that those of the Williams and Lewandowsky ilk can indisputably arouse, may I suggest that those who might have missed it during WUWT-TV’s remarkable debut last week take some time out to view Dr. Ross McKitrick’s presentation which is now available at WUWT.

IMHO, it’s chicken soup for the (rational) soul – therefore definitely not recommended for Williams or Lewandowsky as it might drive them to apoplexy

The ‘Projection’ argument works both ways – psychological projection from those AGW believers who uninformed of the science is common indeed. In fact, when the people who support AGW alarmism say that skeptics are driven by ideology, that is psychological projection. They know their cause is ideological, and they project this on to skeptics.

If they really think that skeptics are this extreme, then by that very fact they must be as extreme.

Lewandowski claims that skeptics are INSULTING THE WHOLE ENLIGHTENMENT. So he is unaware of conservative thought throughout an entire era.

Williams and Lewandowski are effectively calling themselves left wing extremists.

It is hard to believe, just at a moment of heightened sensitivity about offensive speech, and only a week or so after the commonwealth government announces a royal commission into the sexual abuse of children. Even harder to believe is that he specifically links former ABC Chair Maurice Newman into his comments and refers to his ideas on climate change as “drivel”.

But this is what you get when federal ministers like Greg Combet, licence abusive attacks on sceptics by referring to the Leader of the Opposition’s scepticism as “complete bull shit”.

Indeed it is worse than that. The government, via the Australian Research Council is involved in suppressing dissent.

…

Heads must roll over this, including Williams’. But the problem is obviously more widespread and involves the University of Western Australia, where Lewandowsky holds his chair, the ARC, the ABC, and possibly even the government.

Read it all… pop in and leave a comment. It was Graham that alerted me…

Here is part of what is presumably the offending sppech by Maurice Newman,former Chairman, ABC, from The Australian, March 11, 2010: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/media/climate-balance-urged-at-abc/story-e6frg996-1225839329115
……………………….
THE chairman of the ABC, Maurice Newman, has told about 250 leading journalists, program-makers and managers at the ABC that the media had displayed “group-think” on the issue of climate change in a speech that led to a feisty exchange with senior journalists and forced managing director Mark Scott to try to smooth the waters.
Describing himself as an agnostic on climate change, Mr Newman said climate change was an example “of group-think where contrary views have not been tolerated, and where those who express them have been labelled and mocked”.
He warned ABC staffers that he would not tolerate anyone suppressing information, citing the fact that a BBC science correspondent knew for a month before the scandal broke of damaging emails at the University of East Anglia in Britain highlighting the politicised nature of climate science but did not report them.
Mr Newman said the Guardian newspaper had noted that the moment climatology is sheltered from dispute, its force begins to wane.
“Which raises an important question for a media organisation,” Mr Newman said in the speech obtained by The Australian. “Who, if anyone, decides what to shelter from dispute? And when?”
………………….
More follows. I wrote a congratulatory letter to him and pointed out some specific areas that could do with attention.

ONCE upon a time when Christendom was at its peak, missionaries would be dispatched to the four corners of the globe in search of converts. They believed their mission would expand the influence of Rome and save heathens from eternal damnation.

Climate science is a bit like that – push the rewards and the catastrophes far enough into the future, and have faith that the prophecies will come true. However, unlike heaven, which we may reach at any time, climate prophecies need to be distant enough to make them hard to challenge yet sufficiently close to generate urgent action.

Feel free to complain all you bloody-well like to the ABC, then sit back and bask in the sure and certain knowledge that you’ve accomplished absolutely sweet FA.

Here are some comments, and the people who made them, following the Alan Jones affair.
These are the people you should be burying in emails, demanding action – at the very least that they publicly comment on the matter:

Tony Abbott“Alan’s remarks regarding the PM were completely out of line. It’s good that he’s recognised this and apologised for them,” Mr Abbott said.

Malcolm Turnbull“Alan Jones’ comments about the late John Gillard were cruel and offensive. He should apologise to the PM and her family,” Turnbull tweeted earlier today.

Kevin Rudd
Former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd tweeted: “Alan Jones’ comments are lowest of the low. Abbott must dismiss Jones from Liberal Party now & ban him from future Liberal events. KRudd.”

Neil Mitchell
Melbourne talkback commentator Neil Mitchell said Opposition Tony Abbott needed to take a stand on the issue.

“What Alan Jones said about Julia Gullard’s [sic] late father is poisonous and disgraceful and hurtful. Australia must be above this,” he tweeted earlier today.“Tony Abbott must reject what Jones said and condemn it,” the 3AW host tweeted.

From The Telegraph – Sydney September 30 2012

Turnbull especially should be targeted as the Opposition Spokesman for Communications. Demand to know precisely what he intends to do, if anything, as Minister for Communications, to clean up the ABC. State in no uncertain terms that the Coalition will NOT be getting your vote if a statement of some concrete action is not forthcoming.

Send a copy to Abbott and your local member if they are LIB-NAT.

.
Here is a list taken from the Change.org website of companies that withdrew advertising from 2GB following their boycott campaign against Alan Jones:

Complaining to the ABC will have ZERO effect. Remember folks, the ABC does not operate under the same conditions of scrutiny from ACMA that other (Commercial) broadcasters do. Instead, any investigations into complaints about content, bias, etc is conducted by the ABC itself. Does anyone seriously believe that the ABC will seriously investigate something like this given their history (refer to the various investigations reported on by Gerard Henderson at his Media Watch Dog site).

No, as MV points out the best way to get any action over this is to email all those mentioned with a link to the comments and ask them to publiclly state whether they support what Robin Williams (and Stephan Lewandowsky) said, and to continue to follow-up with them until they do make a public comment about it.

Complaining to the ABC will have ZERO effect. Remember folks, the ABC does not operate under the same conditions of scrutiny from ACMA that other (Commercial) broadcasters do.

Not quite true. They do operate under different conditions to the commercial stations, but they are still somewhat accountable to ACMA.

This is from the ACMA website…

The ABC and SBS each has a code of practice.

If you make a complaint to SBS or the ABC on the grounds that it has acted contrary to its code of practice, you may refer the matter to the ACMA if you consider the broadcaster’s response to be inadequate or if you have not received a response within 60 days after making your complaint. This applies only to content broadcast on radio or TV.

If you take the time to download and read the ABC Code of Practice, you might take interest in Standards 7.7 which states…

Avoid the unjustified use of stereotypes or discriminatory content that could
reasonably be interpreted as condoning or encouraging prejudice.

Now, if you feel that the ABC has violated Standards 7.7… you should complain to the ABC on the basis that you believe they’ve violated their Code of Practice. Complaining about a violation of their Code of Practice will be taken more seriously than if your complaint appears to only be a personal gripe.

Also remember… “you may refer the matter to the ACMA if you consider the broadcaster’s response to be inadequate or if you have not received a response within 60 days after making your complaint.”

Okay, the ABC might feel that they are above the law… but I’d image the ABC executive wouldn’t be all that happy getting a “please explain” from ACMA.

Brian – complaints
The most recent info I found on a quick search of ACMA was 20 August 2012. http://www.acma.gov.au/WEB/STANDARD/pc=ACMA_ROLE_DIR
It appears that they no longer have a charter to accept complaints about content with some narrow exceptions, one being child protection.

So far as I know (and not being a specialist) there is no clear path for consumer complaints of the the type being discussd here. Certainly, I have had no success because of one of the dominant skills of the ABC as a communicator. The ABC is a leading practitioner of the complex negative technique of ignoring an inquiry.

I’ve followed the topic of the ABC and the content it broadcasts since the early 1980s with letters to Sir Talbot Duckmanton, who was General Manager until his retirement in 1982 – and a thorough gentleman who responded to my letters under his signature.

I would say however that although complaining to the ABC is not going to have any great effect it is worth a couple of minutes time to send a complaint otherwise they will say that they did not receive any serious complaints…

.
The ABC is a business, John.
There’s a lot more to business than just advertising, John.
Of course, I realise you’re employed at a government-funded sheltered workshop, so you wouldn’t understand this.

.
Suggest you try reading your own links, Cat.
To quote the ACCC from your own link:

As long as you are not refusing supply for an illegal reason, it is perfectly legitimate for you to refuse to deal with businesses if you wish—even if you have previously supplied them. There is no automatic right to be supplied and there is no obligation on a supplier to justify its decision to refuse supply.

The ACCC then goes into very specific detail of what constitutes an “illegal reason”.
Refusing to deal with somebody because they just labelled you a pedophile is most definitely NOT an “illegal reason”.

Of the quotes you gave, only Tony Abbott shows any measure of rationality and considered thought.

As I have said before, the political choice is between the poisonous and the mostly harmless. No one is suggesting that the liberals will actually fix anything. Not making things worse would be an improvement.

Yes I have complained to the ABC. However I have also written to my local member of Federal Parliament (Joe Hockey).

It was the post-Menzies Liberal government that transferred all the funds from the original Compulsory Superannuation Scheme then blew said funds on pork-barreling, reducing today’s pensioners to subsistence poverty levels.

It was the same bunch of Liberal politicians who introduced National Service so young Australians could be sent overseas to die in America’s wars of conquest.

It was the Fraser Liberal government that presided over the largest expansion of the federal bureaucracy and public spending this country had ever seen up to that time.

It was little Johnny Howard, then Treasurer in the same Liberal government, that gave us retrospective legislation, which has been used be EVERY government since to turn honest people into criminals at the stroke of a pen.

It was John Howard, Prime Minister of the the previous Liberal government, who disarmed the civilian population, instituted Workchoices under which hundreds of thousands of honest, hard working Australians lost their accrued entitlements to holiday and sick pay, and long service leave.

It was the same Howard government that introduced a GST which was supposed to replace a whole raft of other taxes (it didn’t), was supposed to remain revenue neutral (it hasn’t), and was supposed to be redistributed directly back to the states in which it was gathered (it isn’t).

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As an ex-Nasho who lost friends, as a law-abiding citizen now disarmed and at the mercy of any marauding crims who wish to invade my home, as a loyal employeee fired under Workchoices and stripped of over $70,000.00 in accrued entitlements, then immediately offered reinstatement by an unscrupulous employer, as an honest taxpayer currently being sued for failure to complete GST BAS Statements merely because I was in intensive care, crippled by a massive stroke, and as a life-long contributor to the original Compulsory Superannuation Scheme (the original legislation was never rescinded) now facing retirement on the smell of an oily rag, perhaps I have a slightly different idea of what “harmless” means.

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Don’t get me wrong; Gillard and her coterie of crims are absolute poison.

But for God’s sake stop deluding yourself that the other mob are any better.

If Robyn’s argument was that David Evans is a liar, that is all he needed to state; ideally with supporting evidence. If he felt the urge to use colorful rhetoric and nail this point home, then utilise something that is actually contextually relevant. e.g. an actual example of pathological lying causing broader community harm.

Are there even people in the public eye who willfully lie about the issue of pedophilia? Your apologetics is weak in the face of the fact that this generous interpretation is in no way anchored in any sort of reality.

Why compare a skeptic to something that doesn’t even exist?

Why even use the ‘P’ word? For no other reason than to single out someone he feels contempt for, and attempt to arbitrarily associate them to people the broader community feel deep contempt for. Nothing more than an illogical, irrational, shrill attempt to dehumanise someone they dislike. And these very same people expect me to yield to their assumed expertise and intelligence? A class act.

John – Robin and Stephan have just in their own perverse and perverted way done a service to the struggle of dissent and independent thinking against the prevailing hegemonic ideology of catastrophic anthropegenic global warming. And yet you continue to defend them with weazel words and slavish dog like barking, tail wagging and yelping. They have in their own inimitable shambolic way done a service to science because their asinine and deeply offensive commentary exposes spectaculalrly the crass political and ideological basis of warmist alarmism. And bless em the boys have truely gone viral. And you mate are such a faithful foot soldier of the “cause”. Ever feel a pang of conscience? A flash of independent thought? As Einstein said – unthinking and loyal foot soldiers are the enemy of rationality and human progress. Keep marching cobber.

There is no excuse for Williams trashing science and defaming Australians (not to mention overseas people).

This little fellow has been stung by the evidence which has swept away his ludicrous assertions and damaged the very friends who once gave him his only “status”.

That he is employed by the tax-payer funded ABC is a travesty. Now he is reduced to imbecilic ad hominen attacks, including comparisons with depravity. Such techniques are the hallmarks of those who have had their arguments negated. Infantile rage and lashing out become substitutes.

Williams must be sacked. There is no room in any public organisation for his crudity, his debasing of science and lower deck ignorance.

The likes of Brookes are part of the problem. Scientifically illiterate and thus easily manipulated, their only responses avoid any connection with evidence. He becomes part of the chorus, “in the language uninviting, of the gutter children fighting..”.

Brookes well fits the description of the fool given a long time ago;

“If a wise man has an argument with a fool, the fool only rages and laughs, and there is no quiet.” (Proverbs 29:9)

Brookes and his very under-qualified hero Mr Williams rage with “paedophile” and various other childish stupidities in their last-ditch attempts to shore up the wreckage of “Global Warming” (now in its nth name change). He should try to string together more than three words of shouting, but a quick look at his other responses indicates that would be well beyond him.

JB,
you are making excuses for and/or justifying poor behaviour.
This arrogant, ad hom, juxtaposed attack by Williams and Lewadandowsky is just as bad as the people you complain about from your perception of ‘the other side’.
Bad behaviour is bad behaviour . . . FULL STOP!
It is gutter politics no matter who is doing it.
Your attempt to justify it is not a good look.
Lewandowsky in particular is conducting a mindless sideshow.
His attempts to ‘characterise’ are merely an academic exercise in the age old political tactic commonly known as ‘shoot the messenger’.
Along with him, you lose credibility if you can’t deal with the actual message.

Paedophiles are obviously not my most favourite people and this stupid rant is extreme, even by alarmist standards. Paedophiles secretly attack and physically abuse the most vulnerable in our society, while sceptics openly attack and verbally expose the idiocies of the most powerful in our society – while the use of the word ‘paedophile’ is obviously meant to be abusive, it is a very poor analogy.

However, while the political establishment believes that everything emanating from the Global Warming Industry’s gravy train is gospel truth, then this kind of BS is going to continue.

So what should we call people who support the concept of trashing the world economy and impoverishing us all, using arguments based on: i) highly dubious ‘science’, ii) gross manipulation of raw data, and iii) using climate prediction computer models which usually have trouble hindcasting accurately?

So what groups in history are famous for their irrational mindless destruction of western world economies? Of all the barbarian groups, I think ‘Huns’ might be the most appropriate word to describe alarmists.

Its easy to call people nasty names when youre out of arms reach eh Robyn?

Solution, Say it to my face.

Its obvious to any reasonable human, that appeals to authority, to consensus or resorting to applying entirely false lables to people is the death rattle of a movement that has no science, no rational argument and no support behind it.
Otherwise itd stand on its own two feet.
Nice own goal there “robyn”.

Not only is this the most abhorrent and disgusting slur against any group of people whatever their scientific thoughts are. For this person to try to take advantage of what many children have to suffer in my opinion is the worse sort of propaganda that anyone could have thought of.

So while children suffer at the hands of paedophiles this ‘person’ is smirking and laughing about something he said knowing full well it would upset people.

So my bottom line is, this person is doing nothing more than using the genuine suffering of children for their own political purposes. Shame on them, shame on all those involved.

The Australian Treasury modelled the effects of the carbon tax and ETS through to 2050. They titled their work “Strong Growth, Low Pollution future” (a more accurate title would be “Weaker growth, no effect on the climate future”).

To get their modelling to support the government’s policy Treasury made unjustified assumptions. For example, they assumed CO2 concentration would increase to 1500 ppm by 2100. They assumed sea level would rise by 1.1 m by 2100. They assumed the whole world would participate in a carbon pricing scheme for all greenhouse gasses – with, for example, USA starting in 2016.

We need good economic analyses by a truly independent, impartial, unbiased, objective group. We need proper due diligence. However, having seen how the Australian Treasury has been politicised, I have no idea how such an independent, unbiased, objective body could be established.

We need to depoliticise Treasury and the rest of the government departments. But it’s easier said than done. This government is embedding Left-leaning, socialist, ‘Progressive’ culture throughout the government departments. Would you believe this government moved the Head of the Department of Climate Change to be the Head of Treasury? And, apparently, they are about to move the new head of Department of Climate Change to be the new head of the “Productivity Commission”. It seems the Department of Climate Change is the training ground for new department heads for the Australian Government’s departments that provider our most important economic advice. Unbelievable!

The global average surface temperature has risen around 0.8 degrees Celsius since 1850. It will rise further in the coming decades as a result of emissions that have already occurred, based on current scientific studies. Without further mitigation, atmospheric concentration is projected to rise to around 1500 ppm by around 2100. This has a 50 per cent chance of a temperature increase of 7 degrees above pre-industrial levels, leading to catastrophic consequences for the world.

That’s just part of what treasury has done to justify Australia’s carbon tax.

Here is another extract from Treasury’s propaganda:

Costs of inaction

While the modelling cannot accurately measure all the costs to the economy and environment of unmitigated climate change, there is no doubt that these costs far outweigh the modest cost of transforming our economy.
The science is compelling, the threat is real, the economic and environmental benefits are tangible, the need for action is clear.
It is not something that gets easier the longer we leave it.
In fact the opposite is true. The longer we leave acting, the more it will cost the Australian economy.

Without global action, we will experience severe water shortages, higher temperatures and less water in the Murray Darling for irrigation. The consequences of not acting will flow through to food prices and the cost of living more broadly.

Australia faces significant environmental and economic costs in a warmer, more unstable climate. Extreme weather events are likely to become more frequent and severe. This threatens our homes, businesses, communities and vital industries.

While Robyn Williams didn’t literally imply that ‘climate skeptics’ were like pedophiles, I believe Graham and Jo have correctly surmised that Williams intended to smear skeptics by association with his choice of inflammatory hot-button language, especially as Williams has a long history of giving airtime to establishment disinformation about the skeptical position and talking derisively of the group.

Williams then proceeds to endorse the Lewandowsky psychobabble argument that skeptics of CAGW are found guilty because of their ideology and their motivation, rather than the skeptics’ recital of climatic facts and actual stated position.

Isn’t that interesting?
We can judge people by their thoughts, or we can judge people by the plain fact of their behaviour, but Mr Willams can’t have it both ways. He is quite happy to judge skeptics by what he alleges their true motivation to be, so accordingly we shall look past the careful literal wording of his actual statement and judge him instead by the intent we believe he has. He can’t have it both ways.

Accordingly then…

What, if any, statistic or attribute do CAGW skeptics and pedophiles have in common? There is possibly one.
In nearly 90% of cases the offender is personally known to the victim.
If Williams analogy had any substance to it, we should expect that in 9 out 10 cases a person is converted into global warming skepticism by someone in their own family! Yes that’s right ladies and gentlemen, quake in your boots. Oh the humanity of this skepticism epidemic. Why there could be a skeptic under your bed right now! (Or hiding in your federal Cabinet if you’re lucky.)
Judging by that AIC report, the situation is WORSE THAN FIRST THOUGHT. Even sex offenders do not have high re-offense rates (20%) compared to other types of crime such as theft (~ 56%) and burglary (~ 58%). But people found to be skeptical of one issue are later often found to be skeptical of other issues! Once a skeptic, always a skeptic, mark my words!

But seriously now. Let us follow his furtive analogy further and see where it takes him.

What is so deplorable about pedophilia, as though it needs spelling out, is that to act out that desire absolutely implies having sex with someone who is not able to give informed consent about what is being done with them.Informed consent.

Now I ask you people, who is the more informed on the climate, its many natural dependencies and cycles, its present state in ARGO and weather ballon data, its past behaviour in geological and plant stomata evidence, and its likely future trajectory? The warmists, or the skeptics?
Who is the more informed on the Climategate double-talk, the Fakegate deception, the impact of the ARC gravy train, the Mann-made hockey stick, the Glaciergate IPCC grey area references, the Gergis goof-up, the Flanneryisms, the top tier banking involvement with carbon trading, the state weather bureau revisionism from ACORN to GISS to NCAR to NIWA to UEA, and the climate model failures? The warmists or the skeptics?

Is it not the warmists who fantasize about the subsidisation of biofuels from sugar cane, the shutting down and prohibition of coal and gas fired electric power, and global governance of every carbon-bearing economic process in the world, and then actually proceed in acting out such fantasies wilfully ignorant of the harmful effect these actually have on world food prices, child mortality in the developing nations, and the economic prosperity of all?

Is it not the State, and its various appendages and hangers-on, who claim to be our guardians having a monopoly over our protection, who wish to supervise us at all times and talk down to us as though we are children?

Is it not the alliance of the State, the ABC, and the warmists which together endeavour most routinely to misinform the public about the climate, to strangle the publics’ formation of a complete and informed climate picture, to bluff and cajole the public into climbing on the renewables bandwagon with the lure of Green jobs that never materialise, to menace the public into submitting to carbon taxation and staying quiet about it, and to thereby have their way with the public purse without the public’s informed consent?

Who is then more befitting of this pedophile slur?
Certainly not the CAGW skeptics.

Mr Williams cannot just bandy about sensitive terms like “pedophile” and not have his chickens come home to roost.

But people found to be skeptical of one issue are later often found to be skeptical of other issues! Once a skeptic, always a skeptic, mark my words!

This thinking illustrates the idealogical difference between people who believe the Government is there to tell us what to do, and should be obeyed as some sort of moral imperative, versus those who believe, at least the modern elected governments are put there to serve their citizenry and need all the help they can get and annot be trusted when left to their own devices to do that effectively .

i tthink the skeptics have a greater capacity, in general, to see the other side’s point of view, while the subservient lefties has great difficulty relating to that the voice of Authority may be wrong.
Truth and authority seem somehow inseperable to them. Truth is what Authority deams it to be, until the deam otherwise.
That kind of truth seems so much like fashion.

I see the argument is still raging as to whether man-made CO2 is causing global warming. Problem is CO2 has been increasing dramatically over the past 100 years, and in particular the past decade yet global temperatures have only increased a tiny amount, and over the past decade have not changed at all. When will the penny drop that AGW is nothing but a fraud. Even if it were true there is no evidence to support it. Let me know when the evidence is there to show AGW is even possibly true then I’ll worry about it. Oh, don’t tell me we should the precautionary principle. If we are to go down that road then we should be focusing all our attention on two far more important threats. One, our planet being killed by a massive asteroid, which is real. Two, an attack from an alien race. However, I consider the second one a joke similar to AGW as I don’t believe in such things, but we might as well take it at least as serious as the so called AGW threat if we are to play games.

This is the same disgraceful and hysterical smear tactic that was used against pistol shooters over here after the Dunblane massacre (scapegoating to divert attention from the reality that where pedophiles are concerned – just like in other areas too – there is never just the one cockroach involved).

This is sickening and depressing because both Robyn Williams and Stephan Lewandowsky are in denial of both logic and evidence. They are not only failing to recognize that other views are possible (something they share with craziest conspiracy theorists), but are robustly trying to stop any questioning of their dogmatic opinions.
Lewandowsky says that his opinions are true because greater than 95% of scientists agree. This is based on flawed surveys, asking trivial questions. It does not mean that they agree with such catastrophic predictions as hundreds of millions of people have shortages of water by 2035 due to the Himalayan Glaciers disappearing, nor tens of millions of Africans facing starvation by 2020 as agricultural yields are reduced by up to 50%.
He completely ignores issues such as strength of evidence, magnitude and likelihood. Neither does he take on board the saying “the cure is worse than the disease”. In other words the possibility that even with a real problem, the policy may be both ineffective and have harmful side effects.

Now where do these people go if no one listens? Pedophiles are pretty much the most reviled people on earth. If name-calling skeptics with the most vile term you can find and still say on the air fails, then what? Risky gambit–they are in “all-or-nothing” with this. Considering how many people will find this behaviour offensive and will realize that ABC does not care a wit about its viewers, it’s a big risk. I’d boycott ABC, but truth is, I rarely watch it anyway. Our satellite provider refused to pay the huge amount ABC wanted to carried on satellite. This went on for 4 months and really, I barely noticed. Perhaps I’m better off that way.

This is how actual paedophiles get away with their crimes for so long – because the term has become a word of abuse and is losing its link to the enormous betrayal of trust that is child abuse. Robyn Williams’ employers should be looking at his contract right now.

[...] that happens, don’t be surprised if they get really angry and call you names and make some bizarre statements about CO2 and skeptics. More on that in a bit, but just know these are very small people. They are of small [...]

You’re right Roy. You can’t be insulted by someone for whom you have no respect.

Anyway, like Robbie Williams, I have always known anyone who disagrees with me is a paedophile. I guess between me and Robbie Williams, that covers the whole population. Time for a new vocabulary of abuse- the old one has become devalued?

I would settle for a John Brookes who could make just one sound, fact based argument for his position in his own words. Instead he takes advantage of Robyn Williams to lay on more accusations of dishonesty…ad nauseam.

And there was I looking forward to another quiet , relaxing , unthreaded weekend…
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The abuse of these tragic victim’s situation by the ABC, to extend their hate vocabulary against others they disagree with, is only following on from the Government’s own example of declaring a ‘Royal Commission’, with undue haste and inadequate consultation, to be seen to reoccupy the moral highground , while distracting from their other difficulties.
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Such a hastily put together , high brow response to an extremely delicate matter has the real danger of doing more harm to these victims.

Not even in Great Britain, where the subject is now proving the undoing of the BBC , albeit for different reasons, not even in Britain is it being exploited in such tawdry manner, by our would be moral guardians.

These are the comments of Robyn Williams?
This is the same Robyn Williams -
President of the Australian Museum Trust (1986 – 1994);
Deputy Chairman of the Commission For The Future;
President of the Australian & New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science (ANZAAS) Congress held in Brisbane;
Co-Chairman of the Biology Department at the University of Texas, El Paso.
He is a visiting professor at the University of New South Wales.
?????????????????

Or is this some other, utterly irrational, anti-science, insulting, crank that can not think coherently?
Or did he just forget his medication in the morning, or what?

100m rise “its possible” Williams clearly has lost the plot completely and all credibility with his latest slander. He will herefore be awarded the Combet degree of Bachelor of BS(with Honors). Congratulations Robyn on your B.BS degree!

Robyn Williams made the following statement, in relation to skepticism of alarmist Climate Science:-

“What if I told you that pedophilia is good for children, or that asbestos is an
excellent inhalant for those with asthmatics, or that smoking crack is a normal
and healthy part of teenage life, to be encouraged? You’d rightly find it outrageous, but there have been similar statements coming out of inexpert mouths, distorting the science.”

This statement is grossly insulting to me, and people like me who are concerned that the predictions of climate alarmists might be wrong.

If Robyn believes we are wrong, isn’t it enough to simply say that we are wrong? Is it really necessary to equate disagreeing with a scientific theory, to supporting the actions of vicious sexual predators?

Given that science tends to flourish in a environment of openness and respect, is comparing people who hold a view on a scientific theory to sex offenders conducive to scientific progress?

Is Robyn suggesting I should go to jail for having the wrong ideas?

Very disappointed. I hope Robyn apologises for this disgusting behaviour, and that it is not repeated.

And as for the comment about nothing between the ears- what a libel. It must take immense musculature to anchor those immense ears.

Gnome, you really should do standup comedy. What a great line. Thumbs up for that one.

If all those medals have any importance maybe he should wear them between his ears. It might help his grasp of science improve. And therein lies the problem — position is no guarantee of understanding, no matter the position.

But we shouldn’t ridicule those we disagree with, should we? So maybe Prince Charles is simply mistaken? Even so, his mistake needs to be confronted.

Rants like this “Science Show” always bring to mind the quote from Vladimir Ilyich Lenin in Max Eastman’s “Reflections on the Failure of Socialism” :

We must be ready to employ trickery, deceit, law-breaking, withholding and concealing truth. We can and must write in a language which sows among the masses hate, revulsion, scorn, and the like, towards those who disagree with us.

Bob Lenin never wrote that. Eastman was an ex-Trostyiste more in common with Williams and Lewandowsky as a distorter and propagandist. Can you quote the original text please because I may have missed it? What Lenin actually wrote was:

“The art of any propagandist and agitator consists in his ability to find the best means of influencing any given audience, by presenting a definite truth, in such a way as to make it most convincing, most easy to digest, most graphic, and most strongly impressive.

Lenin, The Slogans and Organisation of Social-Democratic Work (1919)

Lenin’s writing’s against pseudo science in his attack on empirio-criticism (the para science of his day) and his defense of materialism are quite relevant to today’s debate about science. Please read the original texts and not some distortion. It probably won’t change your view of the world but at least you will have read what the man actually wrote.

Lenin’s opinions on science should be the exact opposite of what we should follow. He thought there was no such things as economic science. As a result, his abandonment of any economic system caused a famine in 1920 that lead to the deaths of five million people, despite huge famine relief efforts from Western Nations. In 1913, Russia had been the World’s largest grain exporter.

Even if Man Made Global Warming were real (and of course it is not) people are too greedy and governments are too corrupt to make the necessary sacrifices. So of course these warmists, who liken themselves to the Voice Crying in the Wilderness, the prophetic witness to truth in this age, are not being obeyed even by those who profess to believe them. This will infuriate them as dissent always infuriate priestly types.

And of course there are the likes of us, the heretics and rank unbelievers.

Look back to the Reformation. Catholics and protestants richly hated one another.

I refer to religion as this is my background, but also because Global Warming in the new Religion of this Age.

The scientific establishment is the new priesthood, so it is as corrupt as the old and will demand obedience and deference as the old priesthood did.

All of this raging, the desire for a new Inquisition with new threats and new punishments, is to be expected

Of course we have proper science on our side.

Evidence directly observed not the authority of a class of professional mediators: I guess that makes me a protestant in science as well as in religion

A new Inquisition? They will start with the most visible skeptics and work their way down.
This web site will be 3rd or 4th stop for the Inquisitors in Australia.

Deniers won’t have a chance. Genuine skeptics may have half a chance.
The difference is that a skeptic knows what evidence would change their mind if it appeared.

Last year they nailed highly visible conservative journo Andrew Bolt on some trumped-up charge, probably as a warning.
A few months ago they sent radio shock jock Alan Jones to their version of a Re-Education Camp, again because he’s well known.
It’s a good time for “deniers” to upgrade to proper scepticism. Get their story straight for the Inquisition. Having a credible argument is also important for convincing the fence-sitters and recruiting more people into the movement.

For any “deniers” wanting to upgrade to skepticism, this old comment and one of BobC’s earlier replies may be helpful as a starting point, but your evidential standard is entirely your choice.

One previous commentator NikFromNYC has fought CAGW for so long he’s even become skeptical of Skeptics for not staying on course.

Pardon my asking but are public and quasi-public figures allowed to vilify everyone and anyone without restraint?

Also pardon my asking why every comment here is not defiantly angry?

Is there no limit to what you will take with nothing more than an appeal to science or the same lame commentary on the writer’s intentions, character or honesty; something we all know has failed miserably?

This quote is from Graham Greene’s novel “Our Man In Havana”. It is about who can do what to whom in any society. In our’s it works on the Victim Value Index but is still really the same thing.

“Did you torture him?”
Captain Segura laughed. “No. He doesn’t belong to the torturable class.”…
“Who does?”
“The poor in my own country, in any Latin American country. The poor of Central Europe and the Orient. Of course in your welfare states you have no poor, so you are untorturable. In Cuba the police can deal as harshly as they like with émigrés from Latin America and the Baltic States, but not with visitors from your country or Scandinavia. It is an instinctive matter on both sides. Catholics are more torturable than Protestants, just as they are more criminal…. One reason why the West hates the great Communist states is that they don’t recognise class-distinctions. Sometimes they torture the wrong people. So too of course did Hitler and shocked the world. Nobody cares what goes on in our prisons, or the prisons of Lisbon or Caracas, but Hitler was too promiscuous. It was rather as though in your country a chauffeur had slept with a peeress.”
“We’re not shocked by that any longer.”
“It is a great danger for everyone when what is shocking changes.” (pp. 164-165 in the collected edition).
Climate “deniers” are able to offended and insulted at will. This is the same for anybody who expresses such things as conservative political views or Christian belief at the ABC or at any of our Universities. Until there is a concerted effort to influence the cultural influence of these institutions it will be hard to get our civilization back on track.

The biggest irony of all, I think, is this. Al Gore is met with great respect especially after his Nobel prize winnibg effort for “An Inconvenient Truth.” Yet, he is the least qualified to be a climatologist. That is, he is NOT a scientist. Just a layman.

Thus, if a layman can have an opinion for AGW so too should a layman have an equally valid opinion against AGW. Otherwise, kick Gore and such followers out of any discussion regarding AGW.

A layman could have an equally valid opinion against AGW, provided they didn’t form that opinion by disregarding the evidence and manufacturing conspiratorial webs of deceiptful scientists bent on creating one world government.

A layman could have an equally valid opinion against AGW, provided they didn’t form that opinion by disregarding the evidence and manufacturing conspiratorial webs of deceiptful scientists bent on creating one world government.

But no one would be stupid enough to do that, would they?

Agreed – The evidence is king.

So where is your physical evidence, derived from objectively calibrated instruments, that

[1] The climate system is subject to net positive feedback to increased concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.

[2] That the rise in CO2 concentration in the atmosphere over the last 150 years is predominately caused by human activity.

Williams thinks of himself as an authority figure. He is throwing abuse in the knowledge that many people will cower under the threat of being labelled with a star on the clothing. Many will silently acquiesce.
With the support of his management he will get away with it.
This is all about stopping the leakage of votes away from his political (pay)masters.

I am a communist and have campaigned against asbestos and other occupational health and safety hazards over thiry years in trade union movement. I abhor peadophilia. I do not accept the catastrophist theory of anthropogenic global warming. I understand that this issue is a matter of the science and not politics. I am also deeply impressed by left wing scientists such as Freeman Dyson on this issue. I am just outraged by the abusive attack launched on myself and many of my (left-wing) friends and all those of whatever political persuasion who have dared to question the prevailing hegemonic theory of global warming. This program is a travesy and a disgrace. Shameful.

Dehumanizing Language
A few months ago, in an article in Nature Climate Change, Paul Bain, another Australian psychologist, repeatedly used the term “denier” to refer to climate skeptics. Bain defended this usage at Judy Curry’s on the basis that it would “activate the strongest confirming stereotypes” in his target audience:
By using the term “denier” we wanted to start with something that would activate the strongest confirming stereotypes in this audience
Bain’s usage was sharply criticized by skeptic blogs (though it was not an issue that I bothered with.) Judy Curry made the following interesting suggestion:

Somebody needs to research the sociology and psychology of people that insist that anyone that does not accept AGW as a rationale for massive CO2 mitigation efforts is a “denier.”

Judy’s invitation unfortunately was not followed up in the comments. Had this been done, people would have made the surprising discovery that, in his “day job”, Bain primarily wrote about the use and function of derogatory epithets (e.g. cockroach in the Hutu-Tutsi and other racially charged terms). Bain observed that a primary function of dehumanizing language is to reinforce the self-esteem of the “in group”:
For example, Bain observed

Subtle forms of dehumanization are often explained with reference to …the idea that the in group is attributed “the human essence” more than outgroups, and hence outgroups are implicitly seen as “non-human”. ..

People typically evaluate their in-groups more favorably than out-groups and themselves more favorably than others…

such labeling has the effect of denying full humanness to the out group, reinforcing the self-esteem of the in-group..

The denial of full humanness to others, and the cruelty and suffering that accompany it, is an all-too familiar phenomenon…

Despite Bain’s prolific writing on the use and abuse of dehumanizing epithets, he was oddly oblivious to the function of the term “denier” as a means of dehumanizing IPCC critics.

My Interpretation of Bains’ scientific research is that likening skeptics to Nazis or pedophiles shows the collective insecurities and feelings of inadequacy of those making the comments. Deep down they know that their beliefs are built on loose sand, and are desperately finding ways not to acknowledge this.

Presenter Robyn Williams has crossed the line completely in this show. In comparing those who disagree with the IPCC’s computer-generated climate projections with those who say “paedophilia is good for kids” (Robyn’s words), you have achieved a new low in media broadcasting.

No amount of weasel-words and motherhood statements can cover this up. Do I really need to list the number of places this contravenes the ABC’s onwn Charter and/or code of conduct? The fact that this tirade was grossly unacceptable on any level is patently obvious.

Immediate and direct action is required fro the ABC. Anything less will see this complaint elevated to the relevant authorities. There is no excuse, repeat no excuse, for this kind of behaviour on my tax dollar.

When repeated efforts to demonstrate a new fact have failed, the proper logical response is to discard or revise the theory, and not merely to assume that the “fact” still exists and someone hasn’t tried hard enough to find it. This is especially true when someone develops evidence that the “fact” very probably does not exist.

I’ve often wondered why normally intelligent people base their opinions on beliefs and when presented with solid contradictory facts, hang on to their original belief more strongly and denigrate any opposition. Unless of course there’s a carrot and/or stick motive that overturns their normal reasoning and they’re just mercenaries. What’s Robyn’s excuse?

If you can stomach the audio, it is worth listening to the tone of the interview, speaks almost as much as the dialogue. Williams appears to be quietly fuming that sceptics are seriously questioning his world view and launches off with his tirade as described above. He then brings the academic stooge, Lewadowsky in and questions him with a series of “ Dorothy Dixers” (leading or rehearsed questions). Lewadowsky happily obliges at his condescending best.

I want to hear about science on “The Science Show” not Mr William’s and his mate’s world view. He seems to be so blinkered by ideology he doesn’t know how close he is to doing a “Gleick” and some may consider he already has.

Keep up the pressure on the ABC, if enough protest he will be asked to tone down the rhetoric or even better will take his bat and ball and run off home.

Thanks dlb,
I may struggle with the idea of actually listening to the audio, and may get brave, but meanwhile here is a comment I made at their blog together with a reply from a moderator:

So if I point-out that the principal four global average temperature records, (two based on surface measurements and two on satellites), show a plateau since 1997 whereas the popular IPCC modelling predicted warming at 0.2 degrees C per decade, then I’m a paedophile?

Moderator: Transcript from The Science Show 24th November 2012:

Robyn Williams: What if I told you that paedophilia is good for children, or that asbestos is an excellent inhalant for those with asthma? Or that smoking crack is a normal part and a healthy one of teenage life, to be encouraged? You’d rightly find it outrageous. But there have been similar statements coming out of inexpert mouths again and again in recent times, distorting the science.

The moderator’s response is pathetic. They could have just said “Dunning Kruger” and be done with it (sarc). I notice you aren’t the only one to get it. The moderators must be a bit peed off with all the comments

I sent something similiar in two weeks back when Williams interviewed climate scientist Kevin Trenberth. It never made it to publication. I did cut and paste my speil from “Word” so there is a chance of some processing glitch. If they did delete it because this nobody was seriously questioning a climate scientist then I will be furious.

I’ve made the following comment over at the Science Show website but it seems to be stuck in moderation, despite a further 30 comments appearing there meanwhile:

Thanks Moderator,
I get it now! You are suggesting that Robyn did not mean to imply that sceptics have inexpert mouths? Did he mean people like Naomi Oreskes or Stephan Lewandowski who have used similar expressions (short of the word paedophile) aimed at those who question the so-called consensus?

What if I told you pedophilia is good for children, or that asbestos is an excellent inhalant for those with asthmatics, or that smoking crack is a normal part and a healthy one of teenage life, to be encouraged?

Mr. Williams,

If you told me all these things, I would tell you that you are a moron! In fact I do not have to wait for you to tell me anything before I reach the same conculsion because you did not make such supposition in isolation, the implications are clear.

As a larger proportion of the popultion recognises the scam of global warming for what it is, your resorting to extreme tripe is an obvious proof of panic in the global alarmist camp.

You and your ilk have lost the plot and you know it! As you are unable to argue the facts or the science, all you have left in your arsenal is feable attempts to re-emotionalise the issue by using a current emotional topic — not very oroginal, I must add.

You, Mr Williams, may call me “paedophile”, “holocaust denier” or anything you and the like of you can come up with and I would never demand an apology because I cannot be offended by you — I can only be offended by poeple I respect and you are certainly not one of them.

Logic.
In wealthy societies, funds exist to care for the disadvantaged (including children).
Every dollar we waste on the AGW scam and the ABC makes us poorer.
Therefore, ABC and Williams are the cause of …

This attitude is almost archaic. Strongly protest to ABC (a Government owned agency) Robin or Robyn doesn’t believe in God, so should we say he should be burned at the stake, hypothetically, I mean. Somehow academics feel they have the right to label anyone who disagrees with them with labels like this. It happened to me when I and others disagreed with some academics over a historic research problem. I didn’t object to being called a climate change denier, but did object to being called a holocaust denier and JFK Assassination denier.

Afterall folks academics have to give proof, so – what proof has he got to suggest that paedophilia can be equated with people who can prove the IPCC are wrong and so is Mann and the Australian government. Yes they are getting desperate, but more than that I feel, when funds are used to fraudulently manipulate science to prove their hypothesis.

John Brookes
November 24, 2012 at 6:26 pm · Reply
Yes Andy, you said it nicely. The “no warming period” vs “the warming period”. But if we weren’t in a warming trend, you’d expect to see equally long “cooling periods” – but we don’t. And that is because there is an underlying warming trend that is impossible to ignore.

Sigh..run for the hills over 0.8 deg a temp increase..Hate to surprise you but we are in the Holocene..all long term trends are for slow warming..since you are unaware..the only semi reliable temp records are for the last about 140 years.
As for no cooling periods..argue with the met office

Over the last 140 years global surface temperatures have risen by about 0.8ºC. However, within this record there have been several periods lasting a decade or more during which temperatures have risen very slowly or cooled. The current period of reduced warming is not unprecedented and 15 year long periods are not unusual.

Source
Hint..if you are trying to argue with people..do some research and dont just parrot something you think you read on Unsceptical science.You spend so much time on this site and you still dont get the basics right….
How is that possible.?

If i wanted to purposely create a warming trend of the land temperatures, I would.

1. move thermometers into expanding urban areas
2. Ignore the urban heat issue
3. LOOSE, accidentally of coarse, lots of rural and remote temperature stations.
4. apply “adjustments” to older readings to bring them downwards.
5. apply other “adjustments” to new temperatures to push them upwards..
then
6. I would “homogenise”, so that any unaffected rural data left whas bought up to the trend of the urban data.

I reckon , that done carefully, I could easily CREATE a trend of at least 1-2 degrees MORE than reality….

Yet the trend is STILL only 0.8C in 140 year.. after ALL that effort !!

Chrissakes John Brookes, Greenland, England and France are still unable to grow the crops in areas they could during the MWP. How much warming do we need to have to get these three countries to return to the climate these were in during the MWP?

Because UNTIL that happens, then the observed warming is but a gradual return to pre LIA times, and hence nothing out of the ordinary.

Your argument is much based on the indignation of finding a political opponent, recently fished out of a freezing pond into which he accidentally fell, having the gall to start warming up in front of a fire, and blaming the near frozen opponent for starting the fire.

Historical reporting of eye witnesses in the Medieval Warm Period trumps all the tree ring gazing etc of scientists today.

But they are too arrogant for that. They would rather figure it out for themselves, and get it wrong because of skewed assumptions, rather than read eye witnesses from 1000 years ago.

I don’t need to be the modern equivalent of an augur gazing at sheep entrails. I just have to able able to read and willing to do so. It is all there in the historical record

As I have said before on this site, i never believed in this AGW because I knew my history.

They can rant and rave all they like. They grew wine in England until the 14th century then imported it by the ton, as historian A N Wilson attests in his book on the Elizabethans. And they stopped growing wine back then “thanks to global cooling” as Wilson says.

knowing how google is deeply involved in the CAGW scam, one has to wonder if they invented this(and other??) islands, so that they could claim one day that CAGW disappeared them!!!

24 Nov: Huffington Post: Sandy Island Doesn’t Exist: Google Maps Showed Isle In South Pacific
A sizable, uninhabited island shown in the South Pacific on Google Maps and other charts does not exist, according to Australian scientists.
Scientists noticed an isle called Sandy Island by Google and Sable Island by others, but it didn’t appear on the navigational map aboard their ship, CNN reported. So they decided to steer towards it.
Even though it occupied about 60 square miles on maps, the team from the University of Sydney found only the deep blue of the Coral Sea when they arrived at the coordinates of the phantom island this month…
“It’s on Google Earth and other maps so we went to check and there was no island. We’re really puzzled. It’s quite bizarre,” said lead researcher Maria Seton, a geologist. “How did it find its way onto the maps? We just don’t know, but we plan to follow up and find out.”
Using Google’s satellite view of the fictitious flyspeck, Sandy Island shows up as a dark mass. As of Saturday morning, it was still visible on Google Maps…
The researchers said they don’t know how the island first showed up on maps, but the Sydney Morning Herald found references to it going back to at least 2000.
The academics were studying plate tectonics, the Guardian reported.http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/24/sandy-island-doesnt-exist_n_2184535.html?utm_hp_ref=email_share

Remote aerial imagery, has come along way since chemical black and white photographs were stuck together with glue.

But mistakes still happen and, for a wide range of reasons, you sometimes get blemishes in the raw data, or in the way they are digitally stitched together.

If you have a look at the image, it is just a black smudge, where an area of the source data has been overwritten, or “zeroed”.

To avoid the more excitable greens from getting the vapours, thinking it is a 60 square mile oil slick, they have stuck a boundary around it and given it a name., while they figure out what went wrong.

At some stage it will disappear without trace – no change in sea level required.

[...] Jo Nova says people who value reason should complain about this debauchery of debate and this astonishing sliming of sceptics. Hearing Williams vilify those many – including leading scientists – who doubt man is heating the world catastrophically, I can only agree this disgraces not just the ABC generally, but the Science Show in particular. Here is Williams in full shock-jock rant: What if I told you pedophilia is good for children, or that asbestos is an excellent inhalant for those with asthmatics, or that smoking crack is a normal part and a healthy one of teenage life, to be encouraged? You’d rightly find it outrageous, but there have been similar statements coming out of inexpert mouths, distorting the science. [...]

25 Nov: SMH: AAP: Ex-Macquarie banker to head $10b green fund
Former Macquarie Group banker Oliver Yates has been appointed head of Labor’s $10 billion green investment bank…
“Mr Yates brings a wealth of experience to the organisation and will be instrumental in preparing the CEFC to begin investing from 1 July 2013,” the organisation said in a statement.
The CEFC will support renewable and low-emission energy projects through loans, guarantees and equity investments as part of the government’s carbon price package…
Treasurer Wayne Swan said Mr Yates would oversee the body as it works with the private sector to invest in businesses seeking funds to get innovative clean-energy technologies off the groundhttp://www.smh.com.au/business/carbon-economy/exmacquarie-banker-to-head-10b-green-fund-20121125-2a15y.html

More links re countries reverting to coal-fired power stations:
Germany’s wind power chaos should be a warning to the UK. Germany has gone further down the ‘renewables’ path than any country in the world, and now it’s paying the price.

In a deteriorating economic situation, Germany’s new environment minister, Peter Altmaier, who is as politically close to Chancellor Angela Merkel as it gets, has underlined time and again the importance of not further harming Europe’s – and Germany’s – economy by increasing the cost of electricity.
He is also worried that his country could become dependent on foreign imports of electricity, the mainstay of its industrial sector. To avoid that risk, Altmaier has given the green light to build twenty-three new coal-fired plants, which are currently under construction.
Yes, you read that correctly, twenty three-new coal-fired power plants are under construction in Germany, because Germany is worried about the increasing cost of electricity, and because they can’t afford to be in the strategic position of importing too much electricity.
Just recently, German figures were released on the actual productivity of the country’s wind power over the last ten years. The figure is 16.3 percent !

I sent my complaint, name withheld for obvious reasons but I am seriously upset by Robyn Williams smear. How dare he!

“I believe smoking causes cancer, I believe asbestos is bad for you, I believe man landed on the moon and I believe Robyn Williams might need to hear from a lawyers soon if he does not retract his vile smear of the thousands of people such as myself!
As a former victim of a serial pedophile I stand absolutely dumbfounded at the outrageous comments of Robyn Williams in comparing people condoning pedophilia to people skeptical of man made climate change.
Was this a Science show or Climate activism and “Stalinist” tactics to smear opposing views.
My personal views on man made climate change are based on years of researching available data and my decision to be skeptical of the catastrophic contribution of man made climate change is based on the hard facts that the real world evidence does not match the alarmist climate models (unless its massaged). Many thousands of far more educated and enlightened than me agree…….Are they also supporting child rape too?
What a vile smear Robyn Williams placed on people such as myself, a victim of a pedophile. I feel violated to be compared to such people, especially in the name of Science.
What Science? This was activism gone mad. There was no peer reviewed proof, just the same kinds of smear and innuendo used by tyrants and dictators to discredit opposing views (views in this case that are well researched and very well founded). To use the very widely discredited Stephan Lewandowsky as a supposed expert witness was the nail in the coffin. Anyone doing even 2 minutes homework on Lewandowsky will surely realise his last paper comparing climate skeptics to moon landing deniers seems so flawed and so biased as to be unfit, in my opinion, for a primary school project. Steve McIntyre has torn it apart as he did with the widely publicised Michael Mann Hockey stick graph……..its more phoney, junk science.
ABC, do your research instead of running some kind of televised “re-education camp” for the masses, it’s so biased its almost Orwellian.
To use such baseless, unsubstantiated claims to smear me as you did is so offensive that I demand a personal written apology from Robyn Williams or I will consider further action.
In the future I suggest you find a presenter who deals with science, where real world evidence trumps hypothesis, propaganda and religious personal beliefs, you might find it refreshing!

I only hope that someone in the Federal Opposition is keeping a score card on all the commentators of this objectionable dialogue and bogus “science” so that when they get into government all these nests of corrupt science can be weeded out by withdrawal of funding to their institutions, particularly the ABC.

“Back in 1978, an organisation called the Paedophile Information Exchange affiliated itself to the National Council for Civil Liberties — known today as Liberty.

PIE — whose members were reportedly attracted to boys and girls — set out to make paedophilia respectable. It campaigned to reduce the age of consent and resist controls on child pornography.

Until it excluded PIE in 1983, the NCCL thus backed this disgusting agenda of child abuse. Indeed, even before PIE was affiliated to it the NCCL was campaigning to liberalise paedophilia and reduce the age of sexual consent to 14.

In 1976, the NCCL argued ‘childhood sexual experiences, willingly engaged in with an adult, result in no identifiable damage’.

And in 1977 it said: ‘NCCL has no policy on [PIE’s] aims, other than the evidence that children are harmed if, after a mutual relationship with an adult, they are exposed to the attentions of the police, Press and court.’

The assumption that paedophilia did not harm a child, and that the only harm was done instead by reporting it to the police, was, of course, grotesque.

Yet during this time, when PIE members were being prosecuted on indecency and pornography charges, the General Secretary of the NCCL was Patricia Hewitt — later to become a Labour Cabinet minister.

A second future Labour minister, Harriet Harman, served as the NCCL’s legal officer for four years from 1978.

Harman has called the Savile revelations ‘a stain’ on the BBC. Yet while she was at the NCCL she seemed untroubled by its PIE affiliate. Moreover, she campaigned for a liberalisation of child porn laws.”

So I wonder whether there are any closet Pades in the ABC for example. I think we ought to have a royal Commission at the very least

The ABC seems to be even worse that our beloved BBC. Like ABC, the BBC is determined to keep pushing the Catastrophic Anthropogenic Climate Change (CACC) hypothesis as though it is scientific fact.

A couple of days ago the BBC was pushing the European Environment Agency message “Climate change evident across Europe .. Every indicator we have in terms of giving us an early warning of climate change and increasing vulnerability is giving us a very strong signal .. It is across the board, it is not just global temperatures .. ” (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-20408350).

In August the BBC was scaremongering about the “Summer ‘wettest in 100 years’, Met Office figures show .. This summer is set to be the second wettest in the UK since records began – and the wettest summer in 100 years .. ” (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-19427139).

In April the BBC was pushing the Environmental Agency’s scaremongering in its article “Drought may last until Christmas: Environment Agency .. England’s South West and the Midlands have moved into official drought status after two dry winters .. ” (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-17690389).

Of course it is all due to our use of fossil fuels causing catastrophic climate change and we have to be positive and push ahead with those “green” electrical power generating schemes. In October the BBC was promoting the EU’s “Worldulike” campaign in its article “Climate change: EU rebrands green energy campaign .. ” (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-19868580).

Taxpayers are only too happy to have their hard-earned money thrown away on those useless windmills and solar panels rather than being invested in the most economic alternatives, natural gas (we have our own shale gas in abundance), clean coal (we have stacks of coal underground) and nuclear.

Talking about hard-earned money, perhaps the motivation for the ABC and BBC is not so much a real concern about climate change but rather real concern about protecting their pension scheme investments in renewable energy!

I have submitted my complaint calling for a public apology in the least by Williams.

Further I have requested a follow up segment by Williams with some of the thousands of scientists that still doubt the level of human involvement in global warming / climate change to understand their reasons for continuing to act as real scientists do – by continuing to question the basis of all their science.

Told them I will not listen to the show any more while Williams remains on as presenter.

“…what we basically found was the driving motivating factor behind their attitudes was their ideology.”

Actually, a cornerstone of the sceptical argument is precisely the discovery that a significant motivating force behind attitudes of alarmists was their political ideology. From Brundtland, to Bert Bolin, to the IPPC and UNFCCC, Rio, Kyoto, cap and trade, ETS, to carbon taxation we now have what Chistina Figueres admits is a “transformational” centralised policy initiative that will affect the “life of everyone on the planet”. A radical decarbonistation, leaving every individual on the earth exposed not to the climate, but to the political and economic machinations of a vast global bureaucracy, with her UN framework as a judiciary, facilitator and implemetor of this Orwellian future.

It beggars belief, that such dilusional aspirations can be voiced without such as a hint of incredulity by the msm, but instead the flames of this political extremism are sanitised for public consumption by influential airtime given to liberal fascists, defaming sceptics as paedophiles, and painting their position of apocalyspe-not as extreme:

“… People who endorse an extreme version of free market fundamentalism.”

This fragrant person is doing the rationalists a big favour. When people cannot argue rationally it is either that they are unfortunately suffering mental problems or they have no arguments and thus resort to abuse.

So in resorting to abuse Robyn Williams is an abuser and has much more in common with paedophiles who abuse children, people who misuse asbestos are abusing members of the public and drug dealers of course in many cases abuse their customers.

If the cap fits Mr Williams I suggest you wear it.
Posted also at WUWT

it’s increasingly common in the MSM – not only ABC – and in our govt since John McTernan arrived on the scene – we’ve had Trash Talk 24/7.

between 1997-1998, McTernan was special advisor to UK Labour politician, Harriet Harman:

2009: UK Telegraph: Harriet Harman under attack over bid to water down child pornography law
The Leader of the House of Commons and Minister for Women and Equality, who also sits on a Cabinet committee on young people’s welfare, is being touted as a possible successor to Gordon Brown.
But she faces fresh criticism from Opposition MPs and campaign groups after The Daily Telegraph obtained documents showing that she called on ministers to make sexually explicit photographs or films of children legal unless there was evidence that the subject had been harmed.
At the time she made the official submission, she was a senior figure in a civil liberties organisation that wanted the age of consent to be lowered to 14 and incest decriminalised. It also defended self-confessed paedophiles in the press and allowed them to attend its meetings…http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/labour/4949555/Harriet-Harman-under-attack-over-bid-to-water-down-child-pornography-law.html

here’s the Drum on ABC The Collectors’ Andy Muirhead when Muirhead was arrested (and more recently convicted and jailed) on child pornography charges. note Barns begins with the “reaction” of ABC is “disturbing”, not the charges:

2010: ABC The Drum: Abandoning Andy Muirhead: ABC’s act of betrayal
The ABC’s reaction to the news that one of its employees Andy Muirhead has been charged with an offence allegedly involving child pornography is disturbing on a number of levels…
By making Muirhead swiftly disappear from its airwaves, website and publicity machine in a manner that fairly harked back to the days when the KGB used to do similar things to those in the Kremlin who deviated from the norm or fell out of favour with the regime, the ABC is giving the impression that Muirhead is guilty of the offences with which he has been charged…
And what about the responsibility of the ABC as an employer to Muirhead? This is a person who is no doubt going through his own private hell at the moment. The criminal justice process is stressful and frightening even when the charges being faced are relatively minor. But when a person is facing charges that carry the possibility of the deprivation of liberty, and particularly when they are charges relating to underage pornography they carry a stigma that will haunt the individual for the rest of their life…http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/34980.html

The Drum does not reveal that Barns was a lawyer, acting for Andy Muirhead.

at no point in Barns’ article does he say, if the allegations are true, it is a tragedy for the children who have been abused in this manner and, as far as i know, since Muirhead’s conviction, the ABC has not apologised to the children in the videos and photographs (some involving penetrative sex) found in Muirhead’s possession, nor to the viewers of The Collectors for not recognising Muirhead was a collector of Child Pornography. BBC has had to apologise repeatedly to the victims of Jimmy Savile.

when it was claimed Kerry O’Brien was receiving a salary of more than $300,000 (hellooo!), ABC commented:

2009: SMH: ABC quizzed over Kerry O’Brien’s salary
The Federal Opposition is demanding to know what the ABC pays its high-profile 7.30 Report presenter Kerry O’Brien.
But the taxpayer-funded public broadcaster has told a Senate hearing that the information is commercial-in-confidence.
ABC managing director Mark Scott said the corporation was “not of a mind” to make O’Brien’s salary public…
Communications Minister Stephen Conroy warned the senator was placing “undue commercial pressure” on the ABC if he pressed his question…http://www.smh.com.au/news/entertainment/tv–radio/abc-quizzed-over-kerry-obriens-salary/2009/10/19/1255891762841.html

I am back James so on with the debate, to answer your question which i assume you mean to be “Please show how the localised increase of Antarctic ice over the previous record is affecting ocean heat content”.

Answer:

I dont think it is.

Remember your graph is titled “Global Ocean Heat Content” therefore you are claiming the entire surface of the Earth covered by water is showing a rise in heat content. I countered your claim with a report showing the sea ice at the south pole is now at record levels. To me this presents a problem, how can the heat content of the oceans be rising and still we have record sea ice? Do you have an explanation?

So to answer your question Please show how the localised increase of Antarctic ice over the previous record is affecting ocean heat content”. I dont think it is.

You think he gets paid for writting disinformation, you give them more credit than they deserve. No James has just run out of gobbledegook so he will now move on to the next topic to spread his bull shit.

Given that the ABC’s Media Watch TV show has a long history of attacking Alan Jones on radio 2GB for his sometimes extreme statements, notably on Julia Gillard’s father’s death intended to be a private half-joke at a partisan gathering and arguably far less serious than what happened in a public broadcast by the “Science” show, I think it would be appropriate to contact Media Watch.
The official channels are:

May I suggest that you ask for a response and address it attention of the presenter and exec producer to perhaps reduce the possibility gate-keeping. The team list is below. Not bad for a show of less than 20 minutes once per week eh?

Quickly, I think it is good to keep chipping away at the ABC’s “independent” CRU (Complaints Rejection Unit) aka officially as Audience and Consumer Affairs and I’m drafting my sixteenth formal complaint. I have had two such complaints astonishingly rejected by the CRU which I’ve appealed to the ACMA and hopefully they do have a tiny bit of independence and logical thinking.

I know I’m a week late, but there were other things that happened over the last few days. But I did do today’s post on this subject — http://www.donaitkin.com — and since Robyn Williams gave me two successive Science Shows to set out why I thought AGW was overstated, I felt that I ought to actually listen to the program. See what I said.

Are you implying that Williams said something worthwhile that we all missed (please quote it), or that no one listens to Robyn Williams so it doesn’t matter what defamatory misinformation he propagates with taxpayer funding?

Nope. Not implying that at all. I found the segment to be narcissistic and self serving. I guess if you assume that I have a certain position on AGW then you’d assume that every comment I make has to comply with an implied agenda. I do try to begin from a position of subjectivity and take data on face value before progressing to opinion.

My interest was to observe whether any sceptics evaluated your opinion sceptically or not, and whether they’d make comments that assumed things about the Science Show episode that you didn’t comment on. Duly they did exactly this; became outraged at what they thought was said and made comments that suggested they didn’t hear the show.

Maybe you need to read all the comments. Not everyone missed that the insult was implied rather than specifically stated. Nor did we miss that implying something can be just as damaging as actually saying something, but implication protects one from legal action. Saying someone is like an advocate for pedophilia, asbestos as medication for asthmatics, and crack for teenagers is meant to provoke. It was inflammatory. Whether or not skeptics response should have been indignation or just shrug and assume AGW is killing itself from the inside is debatable. However, there is ample evidence that this comment was meant to do damage to skeptics. Just the same as saying Mr. Williams behaviour is like that of a general following the lead of the cruel dictator of his movement. Pretty sure that would anger the believers.

I’ll take half a dozen of your pre-Christmas grumpies.
You said “they’d make comments that assumed things about the Science Show episode that you didn’t comment on. Duly they did exactly this; became outraged at what they thought was said and made comments that suggested they didn’t hear the show.” We can argue whether or not that means “everyone” or just most or a quantity that was not stated buy meant something to you more than me, or we can skip the semantics crap and address the issue. Some people did listen to the show and did understand what comparison was made. Some were not upset as much as others. That said, the problem of intent and creating an association with bad or stupid people remains. If Mr. Williams did not intend to insult, it seems he needs a refresher in how to win friends and influence people (in a positive way).

read a Fairfax article in a paper someone had discarded at an airport terminal a week ago, and have now located it:

17 Nov: SMH: Adele Ferguson: The gloomsman has a point, but there’s hope
EARLIER this week, investment adviser Marc Faber, often referred to as Dr Doom for his contrarian views, turned up the doom dial with a prediction that the markets are set for another meltdown that could see at least 20 per cent wiped off their value…
Simon Bond, of the broking house RBS Morgans, said the problems were many and varied, but lack of confidence was dictating the low market volumes. ”We are going to see a rising cascade of companies having downgrades as costs increase and margins fall,” he said. He also believes the canary in the coalmine is unemployment.
”We are a high-cost producer, and we are going to see more and more companies announce job losses, which will hurt consumer confidence,” he said…
(FINAL PARA) As Simon Bond said: ”My prediction is that we are in a low interest rate and deflationary environment for the foreseeable future, and we need to tilt our investments towards new ***windmills***.” …http://www.smh.com.au/business/the-gloomsman-has-a-point-but-theres-hope-20121116-29hoo.html

***DON’T KNOW ABOUT U, BUT I TOOK THAT REFERENCE TO WINDMILLS, AS YET ANOTHER SLY ATTEMPT TO LURE THE PUBLIC INTO INVESTING IN CAGW RENEWABLES.

i prefer to listen to Marc Faber, than to Fairfax Adele or RBS Morgans Simon…

Physics tells us that the adiabatic lapse rate represents that change in temperature that is required to keep the entropy of a parcel of air or water constant when its pressure is changed in an adiabatic and isohaline manner.

Gravity alone determines the change in pressure for a given atmospheric mass.

It seems that most climatologists have never learnt this basic fact of physics, so they were bluffed into believing a false conjecture that an imaginary greenhouse effect caused the observed temperature gradient responsible for the surface temperature being higher than the planet’s radiating temperature.

Consideration of what happens on Venus (whose surface receives only about 10% of the insolation received by Earth’s surface) demonstrates that the adiabatic lapse rate can be the only reason for the surface temperature being hundreds of degrees hotter. Thus it also demonstrates the fiction of the GHE conjecture.

Hannam reports on the reality, and then gives the totallt delusional Christine Milne the final word!!!

17 Nov: SMH: Peter Hannam: Carbon contradiction clouds coal’s future
IT’S a disconnection most policymakers seem loath to confront: global demand for fossil fuels, especially coal, is forecast to grow strongly and yet carbon emissions will have to peak soon if dangerous climate change is to be avoided.
The release of the International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook this week provided the latest update to this stark discrepancy.
The IEA, a body representing mostly energy importing nations, noted demand for coal rose 5.6 per cent in 2011 and is now 55 per cent higher than 10 years ago.
In fact, coal met 45 per cent of the growth in global energy demand between 2001 and 2011, roughly triple the contribution from renewable energy sources such as wind and solar…
On the IEA’s mid-range ”New Policies Scenario”, annual demand for thermal and metallurgical coal will rise 14 per cent from 2010′s 5.1 billion tonnes to 5.83 billion tonnes by 2020, and nudge above 6 billion tonnes by 2035.
Australia, the world’s fourth biggest coal producer, is betting big on that expansion. Committed projects to expand coal capacity total $9.8 billion for ports and $16.7 billion for mines, according to government figures…
***
The opposition’s energy spokesman, Ian Macfarlane, said CCS may be 20 years away but the country had no choice but to pursue it. Moreover, the world would continue to need fossil fuels because for every 1000 megawatts of renewable energy added, nations needed to add 600MW in back-up, he said…
***Greens senator Christine Milne said it was “absolutely essential that we move away from coal and move to 100 per cent renewable energy as soon as possible”. The market would provide that momentum, she said.
“It’s been obvious for some time now that China and India, our biggest target customers for export coal, are moving away from coal, both projecting that industrial scale solar will outcompete it by the end of this decade,” she said. “Coal is a dead end for the economy and the environment, and it’s time the ***old parties*** woke up to that.”http://www.smh.com.au/business/carbon-economy/carbon-contradiction-clouds-coals-future-20121116-29hn9.html

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Interesting to note that within 24 hours of Alan Jones’ private insult of ONE person, made at a private function, being made public, both Tony Abbott, Leader of the Opposition, and Malcolm Turnbull, Opposition Spokesman for Communications, had demanded Jones retract the statement and apologise.

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Interesting to note that going on three days after taxpayer-funded Robyn Williams, speaking very publicly on taxpayer-funded public radio, insulted half the entire adult population of Australia, there’s been not so much as a peep out of Tony Abbott, Leader of the Opposition, or Malcolm Turnbull, Opposition Spokesman for Communications.

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We have just been very publicly labeled as pedophiles, and to add insult to injury we were forced to pay for the abuse. Since no one with any sort of authority is going to say boo about it, the label will now be used over and over until it sticks – just like “denier” was.

And we will be forced to pay for that, too.
And neither Abbott nor Turnbull, nor any other member of the laughably-named “Opposition” will so much as utter a single word of protest on our behalf.

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Just keep all that in mind in a few months time when these very same “champions of the people” are clamouring for your vote with assurances of how they will “represent” you, and “stand up for you”.

MV, in light of your earlier post (and this one) I want to report that I have both emailed and sent written letters to Tony Abbott (as Opposition Leader), Malcolm Turnbull (as Shadow Minister for Communications), and Andrew Robb (as my local MP) stating my disgust at the comments made by Robin Williams (including a link to the transcript, and urging them to make a formal public statement about the matter.

John Brookes, Catamon et al are here for one purpose. To insite anger and vitriolic responses.
Why? So that newbies to this site are frightened off by the apparent “extremism” that we display in out responses. Unfortunately, They are extremely effective at this. (I have been suckered in many times)

There is Only one solution.

STOP FEEDING THE TROLLS.
DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTACES ENGAGE WITH JOHN BROOKES, CATAMON OR ANY OTHER CAGW PROMOTING TROLL. THEY ARE HERE IN A PROFESSIONAL CAPACITY TO UNDERMINE THE RESISTANCE TO AGENDA 21 IMPLEMENTATION.

THEY ARE HERE IN A PROFESSIONAL CAPACITY TO UNDERMINE THE RESISTANCE TO AGENDA 21 IMPLEMENTATION.

Listen shouty boy. The above assertion you have made is, for a certainty as it refers to myself, wrong. You can hang on to this as part of your possibly long list of active delusions, but know that its just that.

Late on this – been away.. but the sentence:
“What if I told you pedophilia is good for children,”

does NOT equate pedophiles with skeptics. It equates pedophilia with climate change. It equates people who argue that more CO2 is good for the climate/planet with people who argue that pedophilia is good for children. I’m not sure there are many of the latter.

So essentially the crowd pulling headline “BREAKING: Skeptics equated to pedophiles” is sensationalist and a blatant lie.

Matt B, Much damage is done when topics like child molesting are aired in public for no apparent purpose. The damage is caused by people in general coming to accept that paedophilia is not that bad after all, bit of a storm in a teacup. For somewhat similar reasons, the press declined for decades to talk much about youth suicide for fear of enhancing the ‘me too’ effect. People are impressionable. Unless there is some common sense used with the word paedophile, it will come to be linked more easily with whatever evil purpose appeals to an author. It does not matter much if the statement above linked paedophilia with climate change or scepticism, it caused damage by desensitising people to its dangers through association with less damaging concepts.
Go along to a psych ward where inmates have been treated harshly by paedophiles to see the real and horible damage than can be caused by throw away lines, concepts and acts.
So yes, as Mark D. notes, why use the word at all?
It has overtones of yelling ‘Fire’ in a crowded theatre, when there is none – but this is only one illustration of its harm.
Yelling ‘Fire’ is a quick way to be in serious legal trouble. This might happen yet at UWA if certain authorities have the guts to act and the intelligence to comprehend.

I find it hard to disagree with what you say. The mere suggestion that someone is a paedophile certainly makes me wary of associating with that person whether there is convincing evidence or not. Where convincing evidence of a serious case of paedophilia is to hand I would immediately want to distance myself from the individual responsible.

[SNIP SNIP SNIP. What a tenuous excuse to attack. please don't turn this blog into an ad hom campaign against anyone. Pete, you are burning the good will of volunteer mods and bloggers. We expect you to self-edit. I don't have much sympathy for your intended target, but No Thanks. - Jo]

Let’s all review what we call “advertising psychology” here. You want to sell a car–say a Kia. So you put a bunch of giant dancing hamsters in the commercials driving the cars and beating up bad guys. There is obviously no reality to this whatsoever. But the association of the world-saving, happy hamsters is designed to sell the car (backfired with me–I can’t stand KIA). Or you get a slinky size zero half-dressed model to lay over the front of a car ad in a magazine. You run a series of “feeling” scenes for cell phones, you have an actor stand on stage and recite a monologue (a male actor selling perfume for women). None of these things are literal. Yet they very effectively get across the message that you should by the car, the phone and the perfume. Same thing works in news broadcasts and talk shows. You don’t have to say “Fred is a pedophile”. You can say Fred behaves like those loonies who think pedophilia is normal. It does exactly the same thing. Of course, you can get sued if you say Fred is a pedophile, so you choose to use the advertising “guilt or good by association” method. It still serves the same end. The means are just “legal” in one case and not in another. If this method of using associations did not work, advertisers would not spend billions using them on a daily basis.

C02 induced Climate Change is a LIE!
It is the cover story for an evil plot to take over the world by the UN which is an agency controlled by extremely wealthy individuals (mostly bankers) who have the following objectives.

The “Climate Change Revolution” is exactly the opposite of the “Industrial Revolution”.
Industrialisation brought about the greatest innovation and increase in the quality and quantity of human life around the world. Releasing large amounts of carbon dioxide has been the BEST THING FOR HUMANITY.

Let’s see what we owe to the invention of burning fuel to create energy.

1. Warmth! Our ancestors discovered fire and were better able to prevent being frozen to death.
2. Cooked Food! We were able to cook food and better able to avoid death by food poisoning.
3. Metal tools! Great ways of killing food so we don’t starve to death.
4. Refrigeration! Now we can preserve food and avoid starving to death or being poisoned.
5. Transportation! We can move about and trade over larger distances.
6. Medicine! We can avoid dying early from curable ailments.
7. Electricity!
8. The printing press! We can communicate ideas on how not to die.
9. Advanced Agriculture! We can make more food and avoid dying.
10. ….

The climate change revolution or REGIME as the author suggests is to reverse all the progress that humanity has made in order to VASTLY REDUCE THE HUMAN POPPULATION. IT IS AS CLEAR AS DAY.

Several tolls on this thread expressed the opinion that there was nothing wrong in implying that the rest of us were pedophiles, as Robyn Williams had done.

In response I asked (very politely) if the three trolls online at the time had any objection to me renaming them in a way as to imply that they too, were pedophiles.

Not one objected in the period set aside for such objections. In other words there was 100% agreement and acceptance by the trolls online at the time, that this was perfectly acceptable.

I might point out, Moderator, that this 100% supportive result from 100% of potential respondents is far and away more statistically significant than the claim that “97% of scientists agree that CAGW is real”, which was derived from a survey sent out to over ten thousand, and calculated from the answers of a mere 75 respondents cherry-picked from a cherry-picked group of 77.

I accept that JFC was not online commenting at the time, and so had no opportunity to input his opinion. However, JFC has been, and remains, an ardent supporter and defender of theConsensus Point of View on all matters relating to CAGW.

It is therefore entirely reasonable that, in this matter, JFC MUST accept the overwhelmingly established Consensus Point of View that it is perfectly reasonable to rebrand trolls with names suggesting that they are pedophiles.

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Put another way, since there can now be no objection to the already established and accepted Consensus Point of View that trolls have no objection to being renamed as pedophiles, your [snipping] of my comment was unwarranted and unjust.

” what we are doing here is we are inspiring government, private sector, and civil society to [make] the biggest transformation that they have ever undertaken. (ie moving to a zero carbon future. Zero carbon = much less energy = much less human life)
The Industrial Revolution was also a transformation, but it wasn’t a guided transformation from a centralized policy perspective. This is a centralized transformation that is taking place because governments have decided that they need to listen to science. (this is an imposed undemocratic dictatorship justified by the propaganda of government employees aka “climate scientists)

So it’s a very, very different transformation and one that is going to make the life of everyone on the planet very different. (you’ve been warned.)

This is not a challenge but a question. I know that CAGW is a crock, but in accounting for it Do i have to believe in a conspiracy theory as for example Lord Monckton does?

Or is it simply a fad, a bandwagon, now invested with egos, too proud to back down coming from people, mostly scientists, who are infected with that kind of myopic tunnel vision that scientists are all too commonly afflicted with.

I really am reluctant to believe that an invocation of conspiracy is necessary, as it tends to make climate realists into conspiracy theorists, and in most people’s eyes conspiracy theorists are simply nuts.

Is their compelling evidence that there is a conspiracy? is it relevant to the science of the issue? and will it not alienate people if it is brought up, IOW is it not a tactical error to bring it up?

I see no reason why this need be a conspiracy at all. It seems unlikely conspiracies exist to the extent many seem to feel they do. It does seem likely a large group of really big egos that got tangled up and in the end will strangle themselves. That said, conspiracies are a lot more fun to believe in because one cannot easily defeat the alleged conspiracy–it is just too big. It’s a really great excuse for failure or failure to act. It’s also rather mindless (apologies to Lord Monckton, but it is what it is). You don’t have to look far for people who agree with you–the internet is full of them. All of the CAGW can be explained by egos, bad behaviour, and money without any conspiracies at all. On either side. No Big Oil conspiracies against CAGW, no Al Gore conspiracy for CAGW. (Do you really think Al is bright enough to be part of a conspiracy? I think he would have to a an unwitting participant actually, someone “they” used.)

One has to ask why you would condone poor behaviour regardless of the perpetrator.
Justifying it by claiming others do it is not a good look Matt B.
That’s actually an argument used by serial sex offenders.
Poor behaviour is poor behaviour. . .Full stop!

Ms Nova. I politely request that you sincerly consider the reputation of this blog when allowing MV to post allegations that I or other skeptical posters are guilty of child molestation.

I am confident that you are fully aware that such an accusation is completely different to Williams’ references to pedophiles which most certainly do NOT accuse skeptics of being poedophiles. If people do have a problem with Williams then I suggest they take appropriate action. I do have a problem with being publically labelled a child molester and will take the appropriate action if required. (I doubt it will be required as I am confident this blog will be appropriately moderated).

(I took off a comment he posted and now in the pending bin but it would help if you tell us what comments you are referring to for the mods to look over.Please use the support e-mail for this to be handled in the background) CTS

Rubbish Catamon,
You may pretend you understand the point but you are nonetheless condoning poor behaviour apparently because you percieve it is either
a) OK because the ‘others’ do it or
b) OK because you believe the ‘motive’ was pure.

In either case it is not a good look.
They are also the arguments that are often used by serial criminal offenders….including sex offenders.
Shonky….very shonky.
It is not OK….WHOVEVER DOES IT!!!!
Jones apologised I believe? And so he should.
What do you think Williams and Lewandowsky should do Catamon?
Apologise or justify?

Is that a defense? I happen to believe that Alan Jones is a fool and what he said about Gillard’s father was disgraceful. I also belive Gillard is a liar. Now where does that get us on the issue of William’s disgraceful commentary and Lewandowsky’s patently flawed and biased research? Your comment is the moral equivalent of a teenager’s rationale for not making their bed – “O she didn’t either”. Try a course in moral logic.

What Jones implied was that Gillard’s father was not a liar like his daughter. Can’t see how that insults her old man. Unless of course you’d rather believe that she got her lying habit from him but Jones implied the opposite. The community anger may have been about Jones’ insensitivity in her grief but that is a different matter.

Jones said her father died of shame. There are two things wrong with. The first is it isn’t true. The second is that it is a gratuitous and crass intrusion in another human beings grief at the loss of her parent. Gillard is a liar because the Labor Party made her that way. Nothing to do with her parents. And Jones is a fool. That he opposes the anthropogenic global warming scare is neither here nor there. There were fleas on Phar Lap when he won the Melbourne Cup.

Connolly – no it is not the equivalent of “O she didn’t either”. not at all. Jones said something really really nasty (and abbott repeated it days later). What Willimas said is comepletely different. So I’m not saying it was ok for Williams because of Jones… but that it is ok for Williams because he’s not said anything that is not ok.

MattB – so you rely on our Prime Minister’s and her ex-lover’s “defense” of tergiversating? Now I have an occuptaional health and safety education fund that you might be interested in slipping some of your lazy dollars into to . . .

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Triple M, I have no bloody idea who you are.
I don’t even know what state you are in.
More to the point, I don’t care.

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I do however, know that you are an utterly nasty piece of goods who previously advised those people in the NH now facing a predicted harsh winter in fuel poverty because of policies promoted by the likes of you, to, quote:

“wear another jumper”

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The truth is, you are a quasi-religious fanatic cultist.
I’ve seen what people like are capable of, in SE Asia and Africa.

Do you know what the term “necklacing” means Triple M?
It’s the kind of behaviour fanatics devolve to, eventually.

Dehumanising the opposition (deniers, pedophiles) is the penultimate step.